A looming “digital dark age” that originates from the mass of data spawned by our ever-growing information economy — at last count, 369 exabytes (quintillion) worth of data — will result from ever-shifting platforms and file formats, and degraded media, says Jerome P. McDonough, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He recommends 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.”