[gnewton77]

I made a great diagram which illustrates this here: '"Research Data and Metadata at Risk: Degradation over Time" http://zzzoot.blogspot.ca/2010/12/research-data-and-metadata... for a paper I co-authored: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/dsj/11/0/11_11-DS3/_pdf

The diagram is based on one from an earlier paper: 'Nongeospatial Metadata for the Ecological Sciences', 1997, Michener et al. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/1051-0761(1997)007%5B0330:NMFTES%5...