SoylentNews

When archivists at California's Stanford University received the collected papers of the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould in 2004, they knew right away they had a problem. Many of the 'papers' were actually on computer disks of various kinds, in the form of 52 megabytes of data spread across more than 1,100 files — all from long-outdated systems.

[...] After considerable effort the Stanford archivists did get Gould's papers into order — first by finding hardware that could read the obsolete disks, and then by deciphering what they found there. “We had some challenges finding old applications to figure out what word processor he used, that sort of thing,” says Olson.

[...] Unfortunately for archivists, however, disk imaging is usually done through commercial software packages such as the Forensic Toolkit made by Access Data in Lindon, Utah, or by EnCase, which is developed by Guidance Software in Pasadena, California.

[...][In] 2011, Lee and his colleagues launched BitCurator, a platform designed for the archival field, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and with continued support from a consortium that currently encompasses 25 member institutions

Data are already being lost to science at a rapid rate. One study, for example, found that as little as 20% of data for ecology papers published in the early 1990s is still available