"Digs that I've participated in have produced information that is now digitally gone because the platforms and the storage mechanisms became obsolete, and that's in the space of ten years," he said. "When we look down the road and ask, 'What will we leave for people 25 years from now, 100 years from now?' we're faced with a huge issue that people are just starting to confront."

Over the course of 16 years, researchers have developed a rich dataset related to research in the urban center and agricultural territory of Chersonesos, a Greek colony on the Crimean peninsula that thrived through the Byzantine age. Thanks to support from the Packard Humanities Institute, the Institute of Classical Archeology was able to use increasingly sophisticated digital methodologies to document its excavations. But by 2008, some of the systems that organized the digital data sat on a single portable server that the team carried back and forth to Ukraine and that, say the researchers, "could have blown up at any time."