Safe archive solutions for the future "Digital Dark Age"

"Digital Information lasts Forever, or Five Years, Whichever comes First."
Jeff Rothenberg

Synopsis

This paper addresses the advantages and disadvantages of digital techniques for the archiving industry. Clearly digital technology offers unprecedented accessibility to information via Internet. The ability to automate the indexing of subject matter also improves access substantially. However, computers and digital media are far from stable as media. There have been many catastrophic instances of digital media becoming lost or inaccessible. Digital technology continues to advance at a phenomenal rate making digital hardware and formats obsolete in comparatively short times, often as short as a few years. This puts a heavy load on archives to maintain access to their growing digital resource despite advances and changes in technology.

Two media have stood the test of time. One is paper and the other photographic film. Film is ideal for archives since it’s a very compact storage medium suited both to documents (as proved with microfilm) and images. The high resolution digital film recorder is a relatively simple machine which can be easily interfaced to digital computer systems to place standardized images on film. Suitably stored archival film can be accessed again at will and by using a companion film scanner the heritage of our civilization can be preserved and saved from the threat of a “Digital Dark Age” where generations of irreplaceable digital documents could become lost after as short a time as 10 or 20 years.

The Digital Future of Archives

For years now, enormous efforts have been made to digitalise the contents of the world’s archives. Libraries, museums, national and regional archives, and both public and private institutions are all part of this process.

All these efforts have three main goals:

the long-term digital preservation of documents
easier access to them
their distribution by electronic means (networks, internet).

more information Whitepaper Download

Solutions for Archive Digitalisation

Digitally archiving documents requires a number of different tools

Acquisition devices such as scanners or cameras.
Processing the data and converting into an appropriate file format.
Storage of data on appropriate storage media

more information Whitepaper Download

Advantages of Digitally Archiving Documents

Very old, historically important documents can be processed on the computer so as to make them more legible
the safe, long-term storage of the documents in digital form
the distribution possibilities through electronic communication media
digitalised documents can be easily transported and distributed without loss
the ’democritising‘ of information
Digitalised documents offer the possibility of access to texts and using automatic computer tools.

more information Whitepaper Download

Digital Dark Age

Despite the advantages of digitalisation we are on the point to lose our entire cultural heritage.
But let’s take a closer look at the situation and try to imagine ways to avoid the horrors of the Digital Dark Age.

more information Whitepaper Download

Digital Data Archiving Gets Neglected

In business as in private life the long-term storage is neglected. Documents of considerable historical and sociological importance will be lost. Even in professional archiving institutions the digital archives all have a astonishingly short ‚shelf-life‘.
It becomes necessary after 10-15 years to transfer the entire digital archive from one storage system to another with increasing costs.

more information Whitepaper Download

Digital Media with an Expiry Date

Digital storage media age and at a much faster rate than analog ones. CD-ROMs have been and still are one of the most popular storage media, yet they are among the least durable media we have. Egyptian papyrus or documents of medieval Europe survived for centuries.

more information Whitepaper Download

Missing Storage Systems and Computers

Storage media develops as fast as processors.
The replacement of computer generations is significant in a number of ways:

when a system vanishes, data formats are lost
when a system vanishes, connections and system buses are lost
whenever a new system comes onto the market, this increases the pressure for change and the elimination of older systems.

more information Whitepaper Download

Digital File Formats That Everyone Has Forgotten

Not only the physical durability of the media themselves and the usability of the storage media is limited, but also the file formats used for the information also change roughly every ten years.

Practically speaking, this means that every ten years when the inevitable transfer of data takes place, a certain proportion of the data won’t be converted and in time will become unusable. This is of course the very opposite of what archives, museums and libraries were established for in the first place.

more information Whitepaper Download

Global Networks Have Failed as a Universal Archive

During the internet euphoria of the early 1990’s people liked to think of the global internet as the kind of universally accessible repository of human knowledge they had been dreaming of a sort of universal archive.
Regarding the millions and millions of documents in the internet: . How does one go about searching through the internet to find really relevant data? In short: The internet is simply unable to solve the problems resulting from the regular changes in file formats and the consequences of outmoded or lacking software.

more information Whitepaper Download

Analog Storage Media: Easy Use and Long-Term Stability

As we mentioned before, the oldest documents of human history are archived on such “storage media” as parchment or papyrus. Quite simply, they’ve already proven that they are a durable and reliable means of storing data. Digital storage media can have a life span of at most 50 years (and even that only under optimum conditions) and in addition, they can only be used if there is also a drive which can interpret the file format. Analog media on the other hand can offer centuries of safe storage.

Paper: the "Classical" Archival Medium

Today we know that properly stored paper of archival standards (i.e. acid-free) can last for many centuries. Even so, paper still has a few disadvantages:

it requires a relatively large amount of storage space
it interacts with pigments and printer’s ink in a way that can reduce the durability of color-printed paper
access is best done digitally.

more information Whitepaper Download

Archiving Film Materials: Centuries of Stability

In comparison to paper the film as an archiving medium is much more flexible.
Film material offers a whole range of practical advantages:

information stored on film is usually analog, so there are no technical difficulties in reading and using it.
it has a great deal of flexibility in both use and distribution
film is a highly economical storage medium
film can reproduce almost any form of information
the technology required to integrate film into a digital workflow is already available
the space requirements of film material are much smaller than for paper
through being filmed, digital data have long-term stability

more information Whitepaper Download

The Best of Both Worlds: From Digital to Analog

Despite flexibility, easy distribution and relatively economical storage media, digital data still have a number of important disadvantages.

Long-term storage of digital data is only possible through continuous and costly data transfer to new storage and computer systems.
Analog storage and the digital world can be combined by using a tried and true technology that is also highly efficient.

more information Whitepaper Download

Film Recorders: Playing It Safe with Data

In principle, any document that can be printed out can also be exposed in a film recorder and thus guarantee long-term storage.
By using a film recorder, the costs resulting from continuous data transfer are reduced. If for some reason the data in the digital archive should become unusable, there is always the film archive to fall back on. What’s more, these data can then be scanned and re-digitalized.

In this way a film recorder becomes an indispensable and highly economical tool to preserve humanity’s most important documents from the "Digital Dark Age".

more information Whitepaper Download