This is always one of my favorite topics to write about - the preservation of photos and other documents stored in digital format.

A few months ago I wrote about how the days of passing family photos from one generation to the next is undergoing a radical change. Some people worry that so many of our precious images/memories are at risk because of uncertainties regarding the technology used to store those images.

But it may be more than just photos that are at risk, says Jerome P. McDonough, who teaches information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

McDonough worries that we may be headed toward a “digital dark age” brought on by our increased efforts to digitize information. The problem, McDonough and others say, is that there is no guarantee information stored today will be accessible a decade from now. File formats change and storage devices can fail.

“Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date,” McDonough said.

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. Magnetic tape, which stores most of the world’s computer backups, can degrade within a decade.”

That puts so much of our culture and history at risk, with files, emails, photos, etc. vulnerable to being lost forever. One example he offers is President-elect Barack Obama’s political advertising seen in some video games. Those could be lost as video game platforms change.

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.”