According to this New York Times article, Dr. Raymond Lorie, Research Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center, has been testing a program to preserve digital documents so that they can be read decades into the future, despite the obvious obstacles of the evolution of hardware and software. A paper he wrote on the topic, titled A Project on Preservation of Digital Data, describes the program as follows: “For data archiving, we propose to save a program P that can extract the data from the bit stream and return it to the caller in an understandable way, so that it may be exported to a new system. The program P is written for a Universal Virtual Computer (UVC). All that is needed in the future for executing P is an interpreter of the UVC instructions. The execution of P in the future will return the data with additional information, according to the metadata (which is also archived).”
For more context and other perspectives on this important issue, see Richard Wiggins’ article, Digital Preservation: Paradox & Promise (from the Library Journal, 4/15/2001, reg. req.) Richard also recommends an excellent resource from the National Library of Australia: PADI, Preserving Access to Digital Information. Here you will find links to topical articles, organizations and web sites, policies, strategies and guidelines, projects and cases, and related journals and newsletters.