Following the Trail of Disappearing Data.

The article highlights the problems which have been causes due to disappearance of data in the corporate world. Since the mid-1990s, it has become increasingly clear that information stored digitally is terribly fragile. Newspapers periodically run stories about this phenomenon and give good coverage to heroic data rescue efforts, such as the British project to salvage the Digital Domesday Book, or conundrums, like the difficulties museums are having curating digital works of art. Research on a global scale is under way to find solutions to preserving digital content, but it's a field limited almost exclusively to academic and research libraries, national archives and bureaucratic record keepers and professionals invested with a defined responsibility to keep digital files alive and accessible for a long time. So it is ironic that even as they're publishing stories about data fragility, newspapers haven't quite made the connection with what is going on in their own electronic morgues.