The question of preserving or archiving digital information is not a new one and has been explored at a variety of levels over the last two decades. Archivists have perhaps been most acutely aware of the difficulties as they have observed the rapid and widespread shift from the use of typewriters and other analog media to word processors, spreadsheets and other digital means. Preserving the media on which information is electronically recorded is well understood to be a relatively short-term and partial solution to the general problem of preserving digital information. Even if the media could be physically well-preserved, rapid changes in the means of recording, in the formats for storage, and in the software for use threaten to render the life of information in the digital age quite short. However, given various technical options, preserving electronic information is not only a technical matter.
Selection is an issue common to all archiving functions.
The selection of information which demonstrated high interoperability between analog and digital preservation is an important goal in digital archiving. Furthermore, questions of intellectual judgment, what information to discard and what to carry forward in what structure and format, are always among the more difficult issues in creating and maintaining an archive. Etext can be distributed in a variety of popular formats. The majority of etext formats are word processor insensitive, a format that is universal to all word processors. With the advent of commercial word processors, etext formats have become proprietary and will only by translated by their respective word processing packages.