page_title: Digital obsolescence
hierarchical_section_title: Digital obsolescence
caption_attribution_description: English: A Domesday system at the Vintage Computer Festival 2010, Bletchley, UK
context_page_description: Digital obsolescence is a situation where a digital resource is no longer readable because of its archaic format. There are two main categories of digital obsolescence:
  Software: the software needed to access the digital file becomes obsolete. An example here would be WordStar, a word processor popular in the 1980s which used a closed data format. WordStar is no longer readily available and modern machines are not configured to read data in this format.
  Hardware: the hardware needed to access the digital file becomes obsolete and thus no longer available. One example is the floppy disk and floppy disk drive; the disks are no longer commercially available and modern computers no longer have the drives to read them built in as standard.
  The continuing rapid evolution and proliferation of different kinds of computer hardware, modes of digital encoding, operating systems and general or specialized software has ensured that digital obsolescence will be an equally ongoing problem. Cornell University Library’s digital preservation tutorial has a timeline of obsolete media formats, called the "Chamber of Horrors", that shows how rapidly new technologies are created and cast aside.
context_section_description: Digital obsolescence is a situation where a digital resource is no longer readable because of its archaic format.  There are two main categories of digital obsolescence:
  Software: the software needed to access the digital file becomes obsolete.  An example here would be WordStar, a word processor popular in the 1980s which used a closed data format.  WordStar is no longer readily available and modern machines are not configured to read data in this format.
  Hardware: the hardware needed to access the digital file becomes obsolete and thus no longer available.  One example is the floppy disk and floppy disk drive; the disks are no longer commercially available and modern computers no longer have the drives to read them built in as standard.
  The continuing rapid evolution and proliferation of different kinds of computer hardware, modes of digital encoding, operating systems and general or specialized software has ensured that digital obsolescence will be an equally ongoing problem.  Cornell University Library’s digital preservation tutorial (now hosted by MIT Libraries) has a timeline of obsolete media formats, called the "Chamber of Horrors", that shows how rapidly new technologies are created and cast aside.  A prime example of this problem is the BBC Domesday Project from the 1980s, although its data was eventually recovered with significant effort.
caption: A Domesday Project machine with its modified Laserdisc. The Domesday Project was published in 1986.
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