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On the digital landscape ... it is still relatively easy for a creator to alter or retract previously released information. Such actions can eliminate or over-lay significant content and thereby corrupt the record. It is also relatively easy in an on-line environment—and equally confusing for purposes of pre-serving information integrity— ... to make available concurrently multiple representations of [what someone] considers to be the same work, ...

We want unambiguous communication with future generations with whom dialog is impossible, without restricting what today’s authors can communicate. For this, we need language that we can confidently expect our descendants to understand easily. This challenge is the kind of language problem that has been central to computer science since it emerged as a discipline in the 1960s. Its core can be restated as, “ensure that an arbitrary computer program will execute correctly on a machine whose architecture is unknown when the program is saved.”

More information is more readily available today, and more people use it, than ever before. Almost all of it now originates in digital form: public re-cords, engineering designs, legal documents, medical patients’ charts, and artistic and scholarly works. The amount of digital information will in-crease greatly in years to come. People expect more ready access, better content quality, and better content fidelity than has historically ever been the case. They will be critical of information deliveries that do not mani-fest these attributes because they know that the quality they want can readily be achieved and inexpensively delivered.