La eterna paradoja de la duración de los datos: el escenario

This short text deals with the problem of analogical and digital preservation. We may see some Sumerian tablets made 4000 years ago in a museum. The tablets contain information about the stocks of cereals, population censuses and the epic of Gilgamesh. We look at photos of our grandparents, whose faces and clothes appear with great definition in sepia tones on a hard cardboard. Something different happens when we look at our first digital photos: blurs and burnt colors. Thus, we are able to look at our grandparent's pictures, but when we try to open a digital document created 10 or 20 years ago we can spend many hours looking for the proper decoder. Sometimes we recover the text, but we lose the design, indentation or accents. The nightmare increases when it comes to other files, for example spreadsheets or databases. It is the eternal paradox of the length of the information storage media. Probably, many digital resources may not be used in the future. Electronic information can be altered, may become unusable by degradation of storage media, or by the change in the technologies of hardware or software. The format migration and emulation programs are some strategies to avoid these drawbacks, along with metadata, ensuring their survival for the future