UK National archives, Microsoft working to access old file formats.

British Library research suggests Europe loses 3 billion euros each year in business value because of inaccessible data.

According to BBC News, the UK National Archives, which holds 900 years of written material, has more than 580 terabytes of data--equal to 580,000 encyclopedias--in older file formats that are no longer commercially available, meaning all the information is not accessible.

"If you put paper on shelves, it's pretty certain it is going to be there in a hundred years," said Natalie Ceeney, chief executive of the UK National Archives. "If you stored something on a floppy disc just three or four years ago, you'd have a hard time finding a modern computer capable of opening it."

The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a "ticking time bomb," according to Ceeney. Speaking at the launch of a partnership with Microsoft to ensure the Archives could read old formats, Ceeney said society faced the possibility of "losing years of critical knowledge" because modern PCs could not always open old file formats.

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Microsoft's UK chief Gordon Frazer said that, unless more work is done to ensure that legacy file formats can be read and edited in the future, we face a "digital dark hole."

Ceeney said some digital documents held by the National Archives have already been lost forever because the programs that are able to read them no longer exist.

According to the BBC report, the root cause of the problem is the range of proprietary file formats that proliferated during the early digital revolution. Technology companies, including Microsoft, used file formats that were incompatible with software from rival firms--and also incompatible among different versions of the same program.

Frazer said Microsoft has since shifted its position on file formats. "Historically within the IT industry, the prevailing trend was for proprietary file formats," he told the BBC. "We have worked very hard to embrace open standards, specifically in the area of file formats."

He said Microsoft's new document file format, Open XML, is used to save files from programs such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and it is an open international standard under independent control.

But critics have questioned Microsoft's decision to create its own new standard rather than adopt a rival system, the Open Document Format. Microsoft's tool can translate between the two formats.

The agreement between the National Archives and Microsoft focuses on the use of virtualization, according to the BBC report. The Archives will be able to read older file formats in the format in which they were originally saved by running emulated versions of the older Windows operating systems on modern computers.

For example, if a Word document was saved using Office 97 under Windows 95, then the National Archives will be able to open that document by emulating the older operating system and software on a modern machine.

According to Ceeney, older file formats present a bigger challenge than outdated forms of media, such as floppy discs of various sizes and punch cards.

"The media it is stored in is not relevant," she explained. "Back-up is important, but back-up is not preservation."

The British Library and National Archives are members of the Planets project, which brings together European national libraries and archives and technology companies to address digital preservation challenges.