Planets - Preservation and Long - term Access through NETworked Services Outreach and Training events 2009

For the first time, the amount of digital information produced exceeds the storage space available. Naturally, not all of this information has to be maintained for the long term, but unarguably more and more born-digital information will be created and attention needs to be paid to preservation for the long-term. Unlike information stored on physical media such as stone, paper or parchment, information in digital media cannot be read directly by the human eye. Access requires the information, encoded as bits and bytes according to the rules of a particular format (the context), to be processed by software and physically displayed.