Digital preservation and economic faults

A well articulated description of how economic faults are a threat to digital preservation and access to information.

Organizations often stretch their limited budgets simply to get their collections online, leaving little or nothing to ensure continued accessibility. There are ongoing costs for power, cooling, bandwidth, system administration, equipment space, domain registration, renewal of equipment, and so on. Information in digital form is much more vulnerable to interruptions in the money supply than information on paper, and budgets for digital preservation must be expected to vary up and down, possibly even to zero, over time.

From Baker, et al., ‘‘A Fresh Look at the Reliability of Long-term Digital Storage’’, EuroSys ‘06.