I spent a few years at the Library of Congress working on a similar project.
While it's "easier" to lose digital, it's a possibility as opposed to the inevitability of losing physical forms like paper, LPs, or wire spool recordings. Physical degrades, there's no (economically feasible) way around it.
In the case of digital forms of the same media, they're stored in high resolution, lossless formats for archival purposes and then down sampled for day to day use. For example, our image scans were 300dpi tifs while the day to day versions were simple pngs. Audio files had equivalent things.
The vision is that the lossless versions can be updated to the latest and greatest formats over time and the smaller versions can be recreated as needed.
While it's "easier" to lose digital, it's a possibility as opposed to the inevitability of losing physical forms like paper, LPs, or wire spool recordings. Physical degrades, there's no (economically feasible) way around it.
In the case of digital forms of the same media, they're stored in high resolution, lossless formats for archival purposes and then down sampled for day to day use. For example, our image scans were 300dpi tifs while the day to day versions were simple pngs. Audio files had equivalent things.
The vision is that the lossless versions can be updated to the latest and greatest formats over time and the smaller versions can be recreated as needed.