UK National archives, Microsoft working to access old file formats.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: UP FRONT

British Library research suggests Europe loses 3 billion euros each year in business value because of inaccessible data.

According to BBC News, the UK National Archives, which holds 900 years of written material, has more than 580 terabytes of data--equal to 580,000 encyclopedias--in older file formats that are no longer commercially available, meaning all the information is not accessible.

"If you put paper on shelves, it's pretty certain it is going to be there in a hundred years," said Natalie Ceeney, chief executive of the UK National Archives. "If you stored something on a floppy disc just three or four years ago, you'd have a hard time finding a modern computer capable of opening it."

The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a "ticking time bomb," according to Ceeney. Speaking at the launch of a partnership with Microsoft to ensure the Archives could read old formats, Ceeney said society faced the possibility of "losing years of critical knowledge" because modern PCs could not always open old file formats.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Microsoft's UK chief Gordon Frazer said that, unless more work is done to ensure that legacy file formats can be read and edited in the future, we face a "digital dark hole."

Ceeney said some digital documents held by the National Archives have already been lost forever because the programs that are able to read them no longer exist.

According to the BBC report, the root cause of the problem is the range of proprietary file formats that proliferated during the early digital revolution. Technology companies, including Microsoft, used file formats that were incompatible with software from rival firms--and also incompatible among different versions of the same program.

Frazer said Microsoft has since shifted its position on file formats. "Historically within the IT industry, the prevailing trend was for proprietary file formats," he told the BBC. "We have worked...