Digital obsolescence

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Digital obsolescence is a situation where a digital resource is no longer readable because the physical media, the reader required to read the media, the hardware, or the software that runs on it, is no longer available. A prime example of this is the BBC Domesday Project.

The rapid evolution and proliferation of different kinds of computer hardware, modes of digital encoding, operating systems and general or specialized software ensures that digital obsolescence will become a problem in the future. Many versions of software in word processing, reading of disk media or decoding of images and films become standards for some time, but in the end are replaced by updated versions or completely new software. Files meant to be read or edited with a certain program (for example Microsoft Word, Winamp, Openoffice) will be totally unreadable in other programs, and as operating systems and hardware move on, even old versions of programs developed by the same company become impossible to use on the new platform (for instance, older versions of Microsoft Works, before Works 4.5, cannot be run under Windows 2000 or later). The problem was brought to the attention of libraries and archives during the 1990s, and has been discussed among professionals in those branches, though so far without any obvious solutions.