If you wander along the National Mall in Washington, DC, you can pop into the marble rotunda of the National Archives for a glimpse of the original Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. These calfskin parchments are preserved under glass, bathed in argon gas. But no such care is extended to digital federal records. The government is presumed to have used (or received) data in every format ever crafted by the computer industry -- some 16,000 formats at last count -- and has stored this data on every kind of hardware. But the fast-changing computer industry never stopped to think about long-term preservation, which means records of contemporary history are fast becoming obsolete -- and there's no existing system to permanently and reliably archive them.

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