Yesterday I said that the story of the Archimedes Palimpsest reminded me of the bit-rot problem. Turns out that bit rot was on the mind of the project team, and that Vint Cerf -- the data-degradation Paul Revere I had cited -- was involved in the restoration effort.

A comment from program manager Mike Toth:

Our team focused on the "bit rot" problem as we worked to preserve the only known copy of Archimedes work in digital form - with guidance and support from the owner, Vint Cerf, Carl Malamud, the Unicode Consortium, and folks at NASA. Our approach to digital preservation included three primary goals:

1. The flattest data files possible, not restricted to any specific software application.
2. Distributed data storage online on the Web, not just in institutional holdings.
3. Data and metadata that meets broadly accepted international standards.

As we look toward other digital imaging and storage challenges, we will be interested in GUI's developed to support this and other cultural data archives, as well as comments you and your readers offer to ensure these and other documents from our cultural heritage live on in digital form.