Making digital as long-lasting as paper
Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2025 6:09 am
There are also cultural and intellectual and not just economic arguments for preserving data. Survey data like these and their supplementary materials provide a window to the concerns of survey designers and, by extension, society at the time. True, cultural arguments for preservation can be expressed more forcefully for artefacts such as images, films, or written works than survey data. But these data stand a good chance of being included within Britain’s cultural and intellectual heritage precisely because they have been carefully managed and preserved.
How can we improve the chances of something being preserved? Professor Michael Clanchy, writing in his seminal From Memory to Written Record, discusses how the concept of records laos rcs data developed. Owing to the media available to scribes in the Middle Ages they made conscious choices between creating an ephemeral document (on a wax tablet) or a permanent record (on parchment). Today digital media proliferates mainly because it provides the easiest means to transmit a work, and so that distinction has to a point disappeared.
Documents and records are now both digital, but the question remains as to what should be kept for posterity and why. These are hard questions which lead to hard choices, because by their nature the cost of preserving digital materials can be much more expensive than their analogue counterparts. You can’t just put them in a box and walk away – the effort and tools required to read a 100-year-old letter is considerably less than the effort required to read a 30-year-old LocoScript popular on Amstrad computers in the 1980s-90s.
How can we improve the chances of something being preserved? Professor Michael Clanchy, writing in his seminal From Memory to Written Record, discusses how the concept of records laos rcs data developed. Owing to the media available to scribes in the Middle Ages they made conscious choices between creating an ephemeral document (on a wax tablet) or a permanent record (on parchment). Today digital media proliferates mainly because it provides the easiest means to transmit a work, and so that distinction has to a point disappeared.
Documents and records are now both digital, but the question remains as to what should be kept for posterity and why. These are hard questions which lead to hard choices, because by their nature the cost of preserving digital materials can be much more expensive than their analogue counterparts. You can’t just put them in a box and walk away – the effort and tools required to read a 100-year-old letter is considerably less than the effort required to read a 30-year-old LocoScript popular on Amstrad computers in the 1980s-90s.