>In short, just work out ways to preserve the bits. If you keep the >bits you can be reasonably confident that the technology will be there >to read them. This probably seems pretty retro, but a good way to do that is to print them out. We know how to make quality paper that is stable for centuries, and since the pigment in black laser toner is usually carbon black, it's unlikely to fade. You could print some sort of bar code for binary stuff but for text, printing the text should be fine since OCR is unlikely to disappear, and that makes it a lot easier for future librarians to tell what it is they're looking at. If we're archiving audio or video recordings, I concede that bar code on paper would be bulky. At this point the state of the art seems to be to record it several times on whatever media seem like a good idea today, and recopy them every decade. R's, John