I can clearly remember the first time I realized the essential paradox in the kind of work I do with older data. A researcher working on a biography asked me if I could recover the data from 99 5.25” and 3.5” floppy disks created between the mid-1980s and early-1990s. I spent dozens of hours imaging the disks, exporting the contents, extracting metadata, and weeding out the file slack and deleted data. Altogether I spent a month working on the project. In the end, the amount of data on those 99 disks could be zipped up and emailed. It was less than 10 MB.

As time goes on, the amount of data we work with gets larger and larger. On the other hand, the older the data are the more time and effort it usually takes to make them accessible. The only way our work will scale to that challenge is if we practice good data curation techniques now; that means using technical and preservation metadata, adhering to standards, and checking for data fixity on a routine basis.