Maybe I read too many horror stories when I was younger, but the concept of a "digital dark age" has stayed with me. I never fully trust online resources to be there after a wildfire, flood, or multiple changes of storage format.
Especially for government publications and similar stuff. As the press disappears, online-only records make it easy for bad news to “disappear”.
In the dead tree form, my college library was a federal depository library. There was a treasure trove of data in there, and at 100 other colleges. Much harder to erase.
In my professional life, digitization IMO has produced lots of data, but the practices around it default to “destroy”, thanks to interia and ediscovery. With paper records, keeping stuff around was the natural state.
This is also a major concern of mine, to the point that I actually considered to start printing the English Wikipedia at home, on very thin paper. Sure, it will take a few years (and probably a few printers) and will occupy most of my basement, but at least I will have access to this knowledge in case another dark age emerges.
I am extremely worried that libraries are now replacing physical books by digital representations. If this is going to continue, there will be a point where the slightest global catastrophe will wipe out most of the knowledge of the past 2000 years.
Where would you get a printed encyclopedia that's current? The only encyclopedia that I've heard of that's still actively being published is World Book Encyclopedia and that's meant for grade school children. Even the Encyclopedia Britannica released its final edition in 2010.
There's a lot of unknown ancient material in the Vatican library. Being all concentrated in one spot, it's extremely vulnerable. Nobody seems to care, though.
It is trivial to copy all of Wikipedia to a USB drive. The entirety of published books in the world would fit in an off-the-shelf hard disk under your desk, ready to be duplicated endlessly with zero loss. Now compare that to the sheer amount of human history and knowledge that has been lost through the ages due to wildfire, flood, wars, politics, negligence and every other force imaginable.
Not saying that digital storage is perfect, of course, but asserting that a physical copy of a book in a library somewhere is safer and more accessible than bytes on the internet is ridiculous.
The problem is not only that of preserving the data, but also accessing it.
We can read manuscripts and tablets produced millennia ago, but are already running into difficulties accessing digital media published in our lifetimes.
E.g.
Compare the Domesday Book with the Domesday project:
