Another option is emulation, in which a software program impersonates a retro hardware environment; essentially, an emulator temporarily “downgrades” a modern computer to act like an old one. But over time, emulation becomes unwieldy: because the host systems for which emulators are designed will themselves become obsolete, emulators must eventually be moved to new computer platforms — emulators to run emulators, ad infinitum.

Nor is the problem just with the medium. We generate over 1.8 zettabytes of digital information a year. By some estimates, that’s nearly 30 million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever published. Even if we had perfectly stable storage, could we ever have enough to preserve everything?

The short answer is no — but only because we’re trying to replicate the practices used for decades to maintain paper archives. In this model, preservation begins only after a record is past its use. With data, intervention needs to happen earlier, ideally at an object’s creation. And tough decisions need to be made, early on, regarding what needs to be saved. We must replace digital preservation with digital curation.

Perhaps the most impressive effort to curate digital information is taking place in the realm of video games. In the face of negligence from the game industry, fans of “Super Mario Bros.” and “Pac-Man” have been creating homegrown solutions to collecting, documenting, reading and rendering games, creating an evolving archive of game history. They coordinate efforts and share the workload — sometimes in formal groups, sometimes as loose collectives. Nor does the data just sit around. These are gamers, after all, so they are constantly engaged with the files. In the process, they update them, create duplicates and fix bugs.

Despite often operating in legal gray areas, such curatorial activism can be a model for other digital domains. A similar pattern is emerging in data-intensive fields like genetics, where published data sets are often “cleaned” by third-party curators to purge them of inaccuracies.

It might seem silly to look to video-game fans for lessons on how to save our informational heritage, but in fact complex interactive games represent the outer limit of what we can do with digital preservation. By figuring out how to keep a complex game, like a classic first-person shooter, alive, we develop a better idea of how to preserve simulations of genetic evolution or the behavior of star systems.

True, not all data is worth saving. But that’s as true for bits as it is for sheets of paper. In this model, at least, the decisions on what to save are informed by a deep knowledge of the field, while the cost is shared by everyone involved.

Above all, the model allows us to see preservation as active and continuing: managing change to data rather than trying to prevent it, while viewing data as a living resource for the future rather than a relic of the past.