> Digital records don't leave much room for ambiguity, and there are already countless organizations working on preservation as a purpose in and of itself, and other organizations working on data preservation for less idealistic reasons.
You say that, but there's data on media from 40 years ago that can't be accessed either because of bit rot or because the technology no longer exists. Hell, most of the content on the internet from 20 years ago has since vanished forever.
Indeed. I've been searching for stuff that I could easily find even as little as 10-15 years ago, and it's gone. Nothing on archive.org (even though it started in 1996), mirrors are gone, it's just not there. Heck, even some more recent stuff can't be found anymore, by any search engine.
As for digital storage in general.. magnetic storage is quite good. Leave your harddrive on the shelf for a few decades and it'll probably still be ok. At least the magnetically stored data. Spin up the disk every two years and the rest is taken care of too. But Flash storage gradually lose data, it's not permanent. Come back in twenty and it's gone.
To keep digital data you'll have to implement a scheme of regularly refresh + copy/convert to newer media. That's a Herculean task if you want to keep all that we currently have of digital records.
You say that, but there's data on media from 40 years ago that can't be accessed either because of bit rot or because the technology no longer exists. Hell, most of the content on the internet from 20 years ago has since vanished forever.