For a country that has been around for less than 250 years, America is having a lot of trouble with its memory. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington is home to such priceless documents as the Declaration of Independence and the constitution, but it is also the final resting place for billions of maps, photographs, videotapes, audio recordings and digital files.
Choosing how to store permanently this ever-growing mountain of data - the White House alone generates more than 6m electronic files a year - is proving a headache. Film and audio recordings are deteriorating faster than they can be digitally scanned, while computer tapes dating back only to the 1990s already need to be copied to avoid losing data.
You might think officials would be rejoicing, then, at the news that scientists at the University of California have created a new kind of memory chip that should last for a billion years. The chip stores information using crystalline iron nanoparticles inside incredibly stable carbon nanotubes, and can preserve thousands of times more data than today's hardware. The researchers hope their memory chip will be on the market within two years - but don't expect the NARA to be among the first customers.
That's because the archive centre has been at the cutting edge of technology before, and is still regretting it. During the 1980s, the NARA stored 250,000 files on advanced optical discs; today those discs are still perfectly intact, but can only be read using hardware and software that is simply no longer available.
Similarly, it is sitting on thousands of reels of computer tape - and possibly millions of Clinton-era e-mails - that cannot be easily deciphered because the data are in now-defunct formats.
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The solution? The NARA has launched a pilot electronics record archive that will standardise formats for preserving digital records. Until that rolls out across America, though, it is still relying on the only storage technology that has been proven to last more than a century: good old-fashioned paper.