Here’s bit rot in a nutshell:

At The Guardian’s 2013 Activate conference in London, the computer scientist and Internet founder Vint Cerf, when asked about the future of libraries in the digital age, expressed concern. “I am really worried right now about the possibility of saving bits but losing their meaning and ending up with bit rot,” he said. “You have a bag of bits that you saved for a thousand years, but you don’t know what they mean because the software that was needed to interpret them is no longer available or it’s no longer executable … This is a serious, serious problem, and we have to solve that.”

There are legacy image formats that are no longer supported. Over time, the ability to import those formats will disappear from current software. This same is true for legacy text editing formats.

Just as we search for ways to preserve our ancient video and photographic images, it’s critical that we work out a mechanism for preserving our digital archives. Interesting article.