The BBC website carries this story today about a looming Information Quality problem. For information to be of ‘quality’ it needs to meet our expectations. One basic expectation is that you are able to get at the information. The British National Archives warns of a “digital dark age” as a result of obsolete file formats (does anyone remember using Wordstar?)  and obsolete media formats (5.25inch floppies?).

Research by the British Library suggests Europe loses 3bn euros each year in business value because of issues around digital preservation. This is the cost of information non-quality in just one national library (but at least that cost has been measured).

The National Archives in the UK already has ‘lost’ information because “because the programs which could read them no longer existed”. The BBC reports that the National Archives are already finding “an awful lot” of cases where information is lost and are concerned to make sure that it doesn’t get any worse.

A root cause identified in the article is the range of file formats that came into being at the very beginning of the Information Age.

But this issue doesn’t just affect large National Libraries or Archives. What about the information that is stored in businesses (this so-called ‘unstructured data’) which may exist in ‘in-house’ file formats or in file formats for applications which your organisation no longer uses? On a personal level, what information do you have on old format floppy disks or now-obsolete memory sticks? What family photos or important documents might you have lost?

What might the cost be to your organisation (or to you personally)?

While this may be an Information Management challenge, the impact on Information Quality is felt when information that is required and is expected to be retrievable cannot be located or recovered. Life is not like Star Trek and, unlike Star Trek, your technicians may not be able to recover information from the ‘alien’ file formats.