Does anyone out there know what recent studies predict for the
lifetime of digitally archived and preserved documents?
For example, there is a long and mostly pretty successful tradition of
preserving journal articles as paper in bound volumes, and experiment
shows that this approach is usually good for hundreds of years. It
*seems* obvious to me that the physical resilience of paper is
outweighed by the ability to make infinite perfect copies of digital
documents, but obviously we haven't had hundreds of years of
experience in which empirically test that idea.
Are there any published studies that predict and compare the long-term
preservation ability and cost efficiency of physical and digital
archives? I would like to either back up or refute my intuition!
Thanks,
-- Mike.
