Dear Digital Medievalists and TEI members,

I have a question about preservation of digital content especially medieval manuscripts. I am writing a small article on the topic and I have consulted a lot sources (papers, handbooks) but most of them do not say anything about the “life span” of the data in specific formats. To clarify this – a .doc file crated in 1995. Will be most likely unreadable  in 2010.  What about other formats? Has anyone done some research on “life span” of a specific version of digital formats and when it becomes clear that the new version and the old one are not compatible anymore? And here I am talking about pdf, rtf, doc (and all office files), djvu, tiff, jpg , mpg etc. (texts and images especially)

In my work I am also making a small remark on XML as a data container since it is, in my opinion, the best way to go and the standard will surely be around for years. But what kind of steps do you make to ensure the preservation of documents that have been encoded in xml

I would also like to hear if there are opposing views on xml.

I also have the same question about the media. I found some research about the longevity of CDs and DVDs but I am also interested in other media like older hard disks, zip drives and magnetic media.

I am sorry to bother you with this, but I can use any help I can get

Thank you in advance

Daniel Mondekar