The proportion of our cultural and intellectual heritage formed by digital information has grown sufficiently for us to see both the problems and the opportunities. Only recently, however, have we begun to grasp and grapple with the comparative fragility of information in the new medium over time. The film has been shown on PBS TV channels across the United States and is being distributed as a video by the American Film Foundation.
Careful management is the conclusion to which the experts come.
Because electronic information is so fragile, they note, it needs care from the moment it is created. Libraries and other 'information providers' need to adopt a proactive policy and strategic approach to secure its preservation over the long-term. The costs of ensuring the cultural and intellectual legacy of the digital age will be substantial and have to be built in at the beginning if their impact is to be minimised and the electronic investment effectively protected. Unfortunately the long-term preservation of digital resources is not yet a widely recognised or understood issue. Saunders notes that prominent authors such as Bill Gates in The Road Ahead and Nicholas Negroponte in Being Digital focus on the information age without regard for what will become the digital past.