Bit Rot & Long Term Access.

Bit Rot & Long Term Access. bram van der werf. Open Planets. 28 February 2011.
Discussion of bit rot in an image collection and the call to examine more closely preservation and long term access. There is a Problem, Requirement, Use Case sequence in the "what we need" section of the OPF wiki.
"We need to make serious efforts to drill down into every individual potential element and risk for Bit Rot. Create Use Cases and take action on these Use Cases and develop practical tools and/or workflow to assure we can prevent Bit Rot." These may be more a case of creating scripts that can compare "checksums" or "open and save as new" type of activities inside a repository.  Computer hardware is "subject to a very short technical life cycle and by far not as reliable for keeping the integrity of the bits as we sometimes like to believe."
It is crucial to understand the challenge and for experts to open a continuous discussion.