illustration : Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No 2 (1847) is known as the ancestor of the computer (courtesy of the Science Museum)

Are we facing a digital Dark Age?

Think about those who tear their hair out over long-term storage of information… How can we ensure that digital data will be readable in the next decades? In order to retrieve information, historians of the future will have to be computer savvy.

We can't deny the advantages of the digital information: the ability to publish and access information is higher than ever. Millions of documents - either born-digital or simply reformatted from the analog material - are soon going to be accessible online, thanks to projects such as Google Books Search and Europeana. But how sustainable is it all going to be? No doubt the weakness of digital technologies lies in the way it deals with the passage of time.

Whereas we know the exact content of the first telegraph message or the first phone call, we simply have no idea of what was written in the first email, only 35 years ago. For some, the last twenty years will be considered one day as digital Dark Age, from which historical documents are impossible to read, due to physical deterioration of data, but also because digital obsolescence, i. e. the change of format, technologies...

"Since 1945 we have gathered 100 times more information than in the whole of human history up until that point ", notes Ben Macintyre from The Times. In fact, most of this information is today in serious danger of being lost. According the American Library of Congress, 44% of websites available in 1998 have vanished one year later.

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