Eoin Purcell

Future History
Last week I mentioned this article that was conerned over the future of non-commercial items trapped in non-digital formats. This weekend the FT has an really excellent long feature on protecting our current digital heritage. From the piece:

Like Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, love-letters between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, and John Lennon’s scrawled first draft of “Ticket to Ride”, these superannuated machines, and the equally venerable computer files boxed next to them, are now part of the world’s greatest library collection. Digital texts – whether e-mails, research projects or literary drafts – are easy to create and even easier to discard. But as John, the library’s first curator of digital manuscripts, is aware, they constitute an increasingly large part of our cultural record – treasures which, if not properly archived, could soon be lost to future generations.

It’s a sobering thought that the Domesday book, written in 1086 on pages of stretched sheepskin, has lasted more than 900 years. Scholars with a permission slip and a sound grasp of Latin can visit the public records office in Kew, leaf through the book’s pages and decipher its inventory of the manor houses and livestock in William the Conqueror’s Britain just as they did in the 11th century. But the BBC’s attempts to create a new Domesday book chronicling British life in 1986 – capturing fleeting historical records such as adolescent diaries and a video tour of a council house – was more problematic. The £2.5m project, stored on huge laser discs and readable only by a brick-like, mid-1980s vintage BBC microcomputer, became obsolete within a decade. Both the laser- disc player and the software it relied on have long since been abandoned. A specialist team from the national archives had to spend more than a year rewriting the software to rescue it from oblivion.

Go read it!
Eoin