“Our cultural heritage is being set down in digital forms as the primary, first record,” says McDonough, an LIS assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Rather than being born on stone, paper, film, or some other substratum known to last for millennia, centuries, or at least many decades, today’s digital records amount to 1s and 0s stored on physical media that don’t last long and are written in a hodgepodge of file formats running on various computing platforms that are even more ephemeral. “There are moments when I feel like Wile E. Coyote who doesn’t realize he ran off of a cliff and is running in midair,” says Jim Kuhn, head of collection information services at the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, D.C. What computer today comes with a 3½-inch floppy drive, let alone the 5¼- and 8-inch drives from late in the past millennium? Even with some universal means of reading data on any medium, future access to the file formats that make data usable is not guaranteed. “If we can’t keep that stuff alive, we will lose a large part of our artistic and cultural record,” McDonough says.