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.

That's beginning to change, as our story "The Fading Memory of the State," reports. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is in the early stages of developing an Electronic Records Archives that will harmonize and preserve all these digital records and make them available online, so saving the nation's contemporary history from destruction. Solving the problem will in some ways test the limits of computer-science research: NARA must not only preserve every data format ever dreamt up but contend with a volume of material that far exceeds that of even the largest private enterprise. What's more, it has a responsibility to save all this data for the uniquely long (if ill-defined) time period NARA calls "the life of the Republic."