Dear Mr. Rose, Actually the people doing these research projects are considering all aspects of long-term electronic records preservation, and all kinds of records. One commitment is to the principle of long-term data maintenance and migration under the archival standards of respect des fonds (which includes preservation of the meaning and relationships of the records as well as the records themselves), and lengthy discussions have been taking place about data dictionaries, markup languages, etc. etc. etc.; a lot of much more talented and knowledgeable people than me have been involved with this for nearly ten years--you might want to look at the journal American Archivist, where many of these projects have been reported on. One school in the archival field is led by David Bearman, a consultant in Pittsburgh who is a proponent of decentralization, or leaving the records to be maintained close to where they were created. Luciana Duranti at UBC, on the other hand (she is the current president of the Society of American Archivists) argues for long-term retention of records by relatively disinterested third parties, such as archival institutions--we don't just agree with her because we are such an institution, but because we find persuasive her argument that records creators will put less and less priority on preservation as years pass and those records seem less relevant to their ongoing responsibilities.
We are not concerning ourselves with finding some ultimate storage medium; we have accepted the fact that migration will be a necessary archival commitment. Our main requirement for "permanent" media is that it be maximally difficult to alter content intentionally.
Pat Galloway