Eternity or Five Years: The Threat of a Digital Dark Age

This was my entry to the 2023 CONUL Library Assistant Blog Post Competition. (CONUL is the Consortium of National and University Libraries in Ireland.) I've just heard that it came nowhere. The competition is held every two years; I've entered four times and come in third place once, four years ago.

I'm quite despondent about this as I'd hoped to be placed this year. It wasn't to be. Anyway, here is the blog post.

On the 22 May 2013, the National Public Radio website published an article headlined: “The First Web Page, Amazingly, Is Lost.” It described the creation of the very first webpage, which occurred at CERN laboratories in 1991. Perhaps no event in recent history has had a greater effect on our everday lives. This historic web page, however, has been lost.

As the article explains: “Berners-Lee and his colleagues were so busy trying to convince people to buy into the concept, they didn't keep track of their early Web pages, says Dan Noyes [CERN’s web manager]. "I mean the team at the time didn't know how special this was, so they didn't think to keep copies, right?"



This is a familiar pattern from media history. Dan Hofstede, a television historian, put it like this: “Would you like Johnny Carson’s first Tonight Show? Or perhaps the first Super Bowl? Well, you’d better settle for a Perfect Strangers return, because to the best of our knowledge those events no longer exist. Sure, somebody taped them when they happened, but some time later, whether it was weeks or months or years, the tapes were either thrown away or used again, and as a result what would now be considered historic broadcasts have most likely disappeared forever.”

Another example is the 1984 Domesday Project by the BBC, recording the geography and social life of Britain 900 years after the original Domesday Book. The information was recorded on LaserDisc and the project cost twenty-five million pounds. However, in 2002, the Observer newspaper announced: “Digital Domesday Book Lasts Fifteen Years Not 1000”. It explained: “The special computers developed to play the 12-inch video discs of text, photographs, maps and archive footage of British life are– quite simply– obsolete. As a result, no one can access the reams of project information - equivalent to several sets of encyclopaedias - that were assembled about the state of the nation in 1986.” Thankfully, software was later developed which could retrieve the information.

Although it predates digitization, the phenomenon has been dubbed “The Digital Dark Age”. Jeff Rothenberg, a prominent advocate for digital preservation, expressed it wittily when he said: “Digital objects last forever– or five years, whichever comes first.”

The term “Digital Dark Age” may well have been first used by Terry Kuny, then a consultant to the National Library of Canada, at the 63rd IFLA conference in Copenhagen in 1997. There, he said: “As we move into the electronic era of digital objects, it is important to know that there are new barbarians at the gate and that we are moving into an eara where much of what we know today, much of what is coded electronically, will be lost forever. We are, to my mind, living in the midst of digital Dark Ages; consequently, much as monks of times past, it falls to librarians and archivists to hold to the tradition which reveres history and the published heritage of our times.”



Terry Kuny

It’s not only changing technologies or indifference which leads to the loss of digital records. Copyright and licensing are also a major factor. As Kuny put it in the same talk: “Increasingly restrictive intellectual property and licensing regimes will ensure that many materials never make it into library collections for preservation. These will be corporate assets and will not be deposited into public collections without substantive financial and licensing arrangements that few libraries will be able to afford.”

In his book The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation (2018), Trevor Owens of the Library of Congress puts forward sixteen guiding digital preservation axioms, which include:

* Nothing has been preserved, there are only things being preserved: “Preservation is the ongoing work of people and commitments of resources. The work is never finished.”

* The answer to nearly all digital preservations is “it depends”: “Deciding what matters about an object or a set of objects is largely contingent on what their future might be.”

* Accept and embrace the archival sliver: “We’ve never saved everything. We’ve never saved most things… The ideology of “the digital” makes it seem like we could or should attempt to save everything. However, this comes from the mistake of thinking that digital preservation is primarily a technical challenge instead of a social and ethical one.”

Perhaps an image we could turn to for inspiration is the White Horse of Uffington, a chalk figure in Oxfordshire, England. Although it dates back to prehistory, the figure has been “scoured” and remade countless times over the generations. The task of preservation is never over, and the task is inherently a collaborative one.