Without laborious renaming, everything behind those links — billions of them, a decade of digital content — will become inaccessible. We're about to enter the Digital Dark Ages. The Department of Veterans Affairs is legally required to preserve all medical records for 75 years after the death of a vet — but it's having problems, in part because of a balky digital records system. "Over the long term, you can't preserve a digital object in its original form," says Manoff, the former MIT librarian. The Dark Ages, as historians used to call the early centuries of medieval Europe, lasted for 500 years.

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