Information technology has completely changed our concept of record keeping -- the advent of digital records was a momentous discovery, as significant as the invention of the printing press. Digital records allowed huge amounts of information to be stored in a very small space and to be examined quickly. However, digital documents are much more vulnerable to the passage of time than printed documents, because the media on which they are stored are easily affected by physical phenomena, such as magnetic fields, oxidation, material decay, and by various environmental factors that may erase the information. Even more important, digital information becomes obsolete, because even if future generations maybe able to read it, they may not necessarily be able to interpret it. Over the centuries analog documents have been written on solid materials such as stone, clay and metal plates using tools to inscribe the characters. These archival methods have preserved records for centuries, and even millennia, but suffer from low information density. Modem methods facilitate writing pages on smooth material surfaces at high information densities. This writing can generate from about 25 to 100,000 times the area information density of microfilm and work with either analog or digital storage methods. Information of all types is becoming more dependent on digital records. These records are often created and stored on computer systems by scanning in documents or creating them directly on the system. Often analog information (human viewable information) is forced into binary form (ones and zeros). The necessity for the accurate and accessible storage of these documents is increasing for a number of reasons, including legal and environment issues. This paper will discuss information storage life, methods of information storage, media life considerations, and life cycle costs associated with several methods of storage.
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