The Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center may digitally store and preserve priceless documents, but that does not guarantee century-old letters or photographs eternal life in the digital world, center officials said.

Boston University must deal with the unreliability of digital media as rapidly changing technology and short life spans affect the livelihoods of important documents, said Ryan Hendrickson, the center’s assistant director of manuscripts.

“The bad thing about digital media is because the formats are always changing, it makes it difficult to keep up,” he said. “The reason to digitize something is to make it more accessible for a bigger audience, not preserve it for the next generation.”

Unlike paper documents, Hendrickson said digital media cannot immediately convey information.

“The digital side is something that everyone is grappling with now . . . there’s nothing material except for a little piece of plastic or a little round disc,” Hendrickson said. “You can’t get any information out of it by just looking at it.”

The Gotlieb Center is continually using new methods to preserve paper documents, and the approximately 2,000 physical collections are becoming increasingly dominated with digital media contained in CD-ROMs and flash drives, Hendrickson said.

He said outdated floppy disks are a problem because information stored on those devices is difficult to read with newer computers. When storage devices are likely to go extinct in the near future, the center prints out hard copies of the information stored on them for archiving purposes, he said.

“The nice thing about paper as a format is that anyone can read it,” he said. “It’s old school but it really lasts a long time and it’s great.”

The process of making these copies is known as data migration and can be costly, he said.

Others in the document preservation field agreed that the evolving dynamic of digital media presented challenges for archivists.

“I just think that one of the main issues is the fact that hardware and software changes so frequently,” said Victoria Ellis, imaging services director at the Andover-based Northeast Document Conservation Center.

The Gotlieb Center is a client of the nonprofit Conservation Center, which helps preserve “paper-based materials,” according to its website.

“It is expensive to keep up with,” Ellis said.

BU Director of Administrative Computing Jay Boucher said he thought the Gotlieb Center would benefit from having copies of its digital media in more than one location.

“Without knowing [the Gotlieb Center’s] current strategy, I would say that they should at least have two copies of their data,” Boucher said.

“God forbid there was a fire or something, they would have backups,” he continued. “You don’t want to have all your eggs in one basket.”