Most digital content not stable: archivists
Last Updated: Monday, March 19, 2007 | 1:48 PM AT
CBC News
Those who maintain New Brunswick's provincial archives are concerned that much of the digital content produced today is not going to make it into the future.
Sound and moving image archivist Denis Noel transfers film and audio to digital, following painstaking and expensive international digitizing standards set out for archives.
"One of the problems is that [digital is] so susceptible, so vulnerable to damage," Noel said. "I've had audio tape come into the archives, for example, that had been submerged in water in floods and the tape was so swollen it went off the reel, and yet we were able to recover that. We were able to take that off and dry it out and play it back.
"If a CD had one-tenth of one per cent of the damage on one of those reels, it wouldn't play, period. The whole thing would be corrupted."
Archivists say the domestic digital formats available to the average consumer, such as standard CDs and DVDs, are not stable and were never intended to be used for long-term storage.
"Theoretically, life is far more documented than it's ever been in the past," said Fred Farrell, manager of private sector records. However, he adds it's not unrealistic to think all that documentation will be lost to deterioration over time.
Farrell says a digital black hole is looming over the information age, because most of the material the provincial archives receives comes from the public. He says if we're not looking after our digital records properly, there won't be anything for the archives to save.
"That's a pretty scary thing," Noel said. "Think of the implications for the province. I mean, if you look at the archives as the memory, the heritage of a thing, nobody wants to lose their mind. That's basically … your memory. It's who you are."
Noel is convinced that a safe and foolproof way to save digital material is right around the corner, but until then, it's up to everyone to do what they can to preserve their digital documents. He says if you want to preserve your visual and audio memories, make copies of copies on digital, but always keep the analog originals.
