The Archive of the Future: What Are We Leaving to Tomorrow's Historian?
Link rot, obsolete file formats, platforms that shut down: how durable are the records of the digital age for the historian?
Translated from the Turkish original: Türkçesini oku
IN SHORT
Clay tablets have lasted for thousands of years, while digital records disappear quickly through link rot and obsolete file formats. Digital preservation requires constant care. For the historian of the future, the biggest risk is losing the records of everyday life.
A clay tablet can still be read four thousand years later. Most tablets were only dried in the sun, but clay baked in a fire becomes almost indestructible. Many of the tablets from Nineveh survived to this day thanks to the very fire that destroyed the city. So how many years will a social media post last? This question will be the greatest legacy the digital age leaves to historiography. Perhaps its greatest loss as well.
Links rot, formats age
Why are digital records disappearing?
The problem has two layers. The first is link rot: the cited page moves, closes or is deleted. Today’s footnotes become tomorrow’s dead links. A 2014 study showed that half of the links in US Supreme Court opinions no longer led to the information they cited.1
The second is format obsolescence. Old word processor files, Flash animations and old databases are examples. The record is still there, but the software needed to open it either disappears or becomes harder and harder to find. Paper survives on its own; a digital record needs a working environment to be read.
Keeping records alive takes work
How are digital records preserved?
That is why digital preservation is not a storage job but a job of constant maintenance. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the web archives of national libraries, emulators that run old software and character encoding conversions are only a few of the efforts that keep records alive. The motto of the LOCKSS project at Stanford sums up this approach well: “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”.
Through the historian’s eyes
How will the history of the 2020s be written in the future?
What will the historian of the future write about the 2020s? Newspapers and books have a good chance of surviving. But the layer historians care about most, the record of everyday life (chats, forums, personal websites), is disappearing systematically. Yet today we can read the writing on the walls of Pompeii and draw conclusions about the lives of those people, because the walls stayed where they were and nobody erased them.
In the end, archiving is as deliberate a work of design as writing itself. It is no coincidence that this blog is published as static files. It is the simplest form, with the fewest dependencies, for a record to stay standing.
Notes
-
Zittrain, Albert and Lessig (2014). The same study found that more than 70 per cent of the links in the Harvard Law Review and two other law journals also no longer led to the information they cited. ↩
References
- Reich, V., & Rosenthal, D. S. H. (2001). LOCKSS: A permanent web publishing and access system. D-Lib Magazine, 7(6). https://www.dlib.org/dlib/june01/reich/06reich.html
- Rosenzweig, R. (2003). Scarcity or abundance? Preserving the past in a digital era. American Historical Review, 108(3), 735–762. https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/108/3/735/22504
- Zittrain, J., Albert, K., & Lessig, L. (2014). Perma: Scoping and addressing the problem of link and reference rot in legal citations. Harvard Law Review Forum, 127, 176. https://harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-127/perma-scoping-and-addressing-the-problem-of-link-and-reference-rot-in-legal-citations/
