My daughter, one of whose gigs is book restoration, but whose interests extend to the preservation of all media, turned me on to It Takes a Village to Save a Hard Drive.

Much of it is waaay over-the-top technical, but it's still followable.

Wow, that's amazing!

The issue of preservation of digital media is a thorny one. A lot of historians are concerned that the 20th century will end up being one of the most poorly documented periods in all of human history, because so much of our documentation exists on digital media with an incredibly short life expectancy. I have a friend who's a rather lovely young woman (in truth, I have a bit of a crush on her) who works as a data archivist for the Canadian government, and we've had several conversations about the difficulties involved with digital data preservation. Kudos to these guys.

You'll probably also be interested in Whitney Saves Douglas Davis’s ‘First Collaborative Sentence’, then.

I've gone back and forth on this with my daughter, and we agree that the restoration wasn't worth the effort. (I don't even particularly think it's art.)