This article is about archives in the United Kingdom.
From the Domesday Book to modern government papers, the National Archives' collection of more than 11 m historical government and public records is one of the world’s largest. It includes paper and parchment, photographs, maps and paintings, but also a vast number of digital records such as archived government websites, emails and social media posts. Paper may last for thousands of years, but what about the ever-expanding quantity of digital documents?
The National Archives' broad remit under the Public Records Act is to permanently preserve the records of the UK government that have been selected for their historic value.
Our physical records that date back over 1,000 years take up more than 200 km of shelving and require delicate conservation work and careful storage. The digital age on the other hand requires little physical space but presents different challenges – how do archivists cope as we move from parchment to pixels?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17 2015, @07:41PM
In 2008, LoC took a $3M donation from MSFT and adopted their proprietary Silverlight format.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17 2015, @09:07PM
To be fair that has more to do with exhibits on the public-facing Web site [microsoft.com] than actual preservation of history.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday January 17 2015, @08:02PM
No matter when you do this, its going to be obsolete before you get halfway through your current collection, to say nothing about the daily flow of documents of questionable worth. (Which includes virtually ALL of the social media input they hope to capture).
If they use the very best imaging quality available today, the documents will still look quaint in 10 or 20 years.
I only hope it is more accessible than most of these digital archives. But in the end I suspect it will be just as opaque as the stacks of papers are to anyone other than a few scholars with connections in high places. A huge, poorly cataloged, collection of images, with no textual translation.
You also have to worry about all those Petabytes going missing all at once due to some lightning strike or EMP incident. It was a huge job to recover Lunar Orbiter Photos [wikipedia.org] from long forgotten tapes.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17 2015, @09:10PM
You need redundancy. If this information were public domain then anyone and any organization can store mirrors to preserve it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17 2015, @09:16PM
As long as they don't discard the originals they can do it over again, potentially with drones and robots.
With historical document digitization you want OCR, very high resolution imagery, and maybe some more exotic imagery (like x-rays to reveal "hidden paintings" or erased marks on documents).
For flat items such as docs, maps, and the surface of most paintings, I don't see a scanning effort becoming obsolete very quickly. You won't be able to recreate the documents molecule by molecule using the digital copy, but it seems like 2D scanned images won't need very much improvement vs. 3D models and point cloud data that museums like the Smithsonian are starting to collect for physical objects.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Gigapixel_images_from_the_Google_Art_Project [wikimedia.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Nuke on Sunday January 18 2015, @02:06PM
And on what medium? 8" floppies? 5.25" floppies? 3.5" floppies? Cd? DVD? USB sticks?
I remember a story about a "time capsule" buried in the 1980's by a group of schools, in the form of box containing data on some sort of optical disk about a foot across. After about 20 years someone remembered about it and realised that the disk format was obsolete. They dug it up again with the intention of transferring to CD-ROM (remember those?). However, they could no longer find a device that could read the original optical disk.
That was after only 20 years !