I think this is a challenge that there is no clear solution to, but I also think this is an issue we are already dealing with. Outdated formats are something that we are dealing with already with the push to digitize most archives.

There are pros and cons to everything. During my grad work we talked about what do you do with the documents have scanned, do we save it or destroy it? Space in the archives is limited and there are always more things to store. We talked about how the university had recently destroyed almost all of the board of regents meeting minutes from the 1980's to the early 2000's. They simply didn't have the space or the time to scan it.

But you cant scan an artifact like a pot, a piece of art, or a suit of armor. I think in a lot of ways archives will have to start deciding on what to save, which is never a fun question. I also think some intangible "stuff" is lost with digital items.

I think it will be a mixed bag of good and bad, as someone who wrote their thesis during the lockdowns, the ability to virtually visit all of the necessary archives to write it was amazing. I suspect I still could have found more or different documents if I visited in person, but at the end of the day I was still able to write a fairly competent paper without having to travel across the state or region to get the documents. I also think that websites like Internet Archives also help to "democratize" history.

This is just my take on it, but I think the challenge will be figuring out what can be digitized, but then what should be save after it is digitized.

This is something that I've had concerns about as well, and my personal speculation is that the early internet era (i.e. now) might be one of the least documented eras of history.

For one, the lack of reliance on physical records. Paper doesn't age well unless stored in humidity controlled environments. From ancient eras, most paper (or paper-like) documents have not survived, but we are only aware of them because they were copied and re-copied down the ages. Not only will any paper copies we have of things decay, but we rely on them less in favor of digital records. Digital records will decay as well; data decay is a real thing where magnetism of the physical disk is slowly lost over time. If I took my working hard drive out of my computer and put it in a time capsule, it would be very unlikely that the data would be readable even if they could access it. So the question isn't "which websites are still going to be there" its "which information will we actively preserve." And even if things are backed up, there is a certain degradation that can occur in that process as well.

So after taking all that into consideration, we are also in the very early stages where things are evolving quickly and are not fully standardized. There are several bottle necks that seems to keep things from progressing too quickly now (cell phone dependence on Lithium Ion batteries comes to mind first) that if we find an alternate solution, I would imagine our current technology we use today will become quickly obsolete. Unless all those pictures people take and store and their phones and computers are backed up and moved, they can easily be lost on those obsolete devices until the aforementioned data decay ruins all its data before future generations can find it.

Think also that older generations also would have a lot of pictures stored on their devices (my dad has a whole bunch of pictures stored on his PC for instance). When he passes, unless I actively grab those pictures, they will be lost as well. Compare this to a few decades ago where you would have physical photo albums that can be passed down and found as a physical object in their house, or even previous to that in the later 1800s when photos were stored on pieces of metal or glass. Those could be thrown in a drawer for people to find 100s of years later in nearly as good of a state as when it was new. Comparatively, unless I knew about the digital stores of pictures my parents had, they would easily be lost with no way for future generations to find them.

I think it is, largely, going to be a real issue.

Access to so many sources would, intuitively, be a good thing (and as an ancient historian I have been frustrated quite a few times at the lack of sources on some topics), but sources can be very misleading. But we also shouldn't fall in the trap of saying "this source is objectively incorrect, therefore bad" because they still give us valuable insights into society and its different schools of thought. But needless to say, with so many outright contradicting views out there, our future colleagues will have their work cut out for them.

On your point of file formats, I think that isn't necessarily as big a problem as it may seem. We have old machines running old OSs, and it should be pretty easy to cook up programs to read old formats. Furthermore, we have quite a few web archives, and as the, slightly hyperbolic, saying goes: the internet never forgets.

I would, however, be worried about the internet in the long term. Assuming a certain man in a certain country doesn't press the proverbial button and cause the apocalypse, the internet isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But the more time passes, the more likely it is that something can happen to the internet, and sites that aren’t backed up can just go poof. This is the big issue with digitizing. On the one hand it makes information available at a moment's notice, but we grow more and more reliant on it. Furthermore, our current storage options only last so long, so don't expect a hard drive to work in a century

/u/caffarelli and /u/restricteddata and /u/FrenchMurazor, among others, have contributed to the section of the subreddit FAQ about 'historians in the digital age', including digital archives and archiving digital materials. You may need to scroll down a bit at the link.