If we gave you data from NASA's 1976 Viking landing on Mars, could you read it?   No, and neither can anyone else.   Some of the data collected is already unreadable and lost forever.  According to the National Archives Web site, by the mid-1970s only two machines could read the data from the 1960 U.S. Census: One was in Japan, the other in the Smithsonian Institution. 

We're in the digital dark ages, we just don't know it.   Left alone, a framed photograph will fade and yellow over time, but your grandchildren will still be able to see it.   However, a digital photo file of that picture may be unreadable to future computers.

According to Jerome P. McDonough, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,  the issue of a looming digital dark age originates from the mass of data spawned by our ever-growing information economy – at last count, 369 exabytes worth of data, including electronic records, tax files, e-mail, music and photos.

How many zeroes is that?  An exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes; a quintillion is the number 1 followed by 18 zeroes.

Contrary to popular belief, electronic data has proven to be much more ephemeral than books, journals or pieces of plastic art. After all, when was the last time you opened a WordPerfect file or tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk?

From a cultural perspective, McDonough said there's a "huge amount" of content that's only being developed or is available in a digital-only format.  "E-mail is a classic example of that," he said. "It runs both the modern business world and government. If that information is lost, you've lost the archive of what has actually happened in the modern world. We've seen a couple of examples of this so far."

McDonough believes there would also be an economic effect to the loss of data from a digital dark age.

"We would essentially be burning money because we would lose the huge economic investment libraries and archives have made digitizing materials to make them accessible," he said. "Governments are likewise investing huge sums to make documents available to the public in electronic form."

To avoid a digital dark age, McDonough says that we need to figure out the best way to keep valuable data alive and accessible by using a multi-prong approach of migrating data to new formats, devising methods of getting old software to work on existing platforms, using open-source file formats and software, and creating data that's "media-independent."

"Reliance on open standards is certainly a huge part, but it's not the only part," he said. "If we want information to survive, we really need to avoid formats that depend on a particular media type. Commercial DVDs that employ protection schemes make it impossible for libraries to legally transfer the content to new media. When the old media dies, the information dies with it."

Enthusiasm for switching from proprietary software such as Microsoft's Office suite to open-source software such as OpenOffice has only recently begun to gather momentum outside of information technology circles.

"Software companies have seen the benefits of locking people into a platform and have been very resistant to change," McDonough said. "Now we are actually starting to see some market mandates in the open direction."

McDonough cites Brazil, the Netherlands and Norway as examples of countries that have mandated the use of non-proprietary file formats for government business.

"There has been quite a movement, particularly among governments, to say: 'We're not going to buy software that uses proprietary file formats exclusively. You're going to have to provide an open format so we can escape from the platform,' " he said. "With that market demand, you really did see some more pressure on vendors to move to something open."