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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: 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With historical document digitization you want OCR, very high resolution imagery, and maybe some more exotic imagery (like x-rays to reveal "hidden paintings" or erased marks on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]