In 1986, the British Broadcasting Corporation created the Domesday Book Mark II, an electronic version of the original record of English lands that was written at the instigation of William the Conqueror in 1086 [nine hundred years earlier]. The BBC’s version contained 25,000 maps, 50,000 pictures, 60 minutes of video and millions of words. It cost 2.5 million pounds to create.
Only 17 years after its creation [in 2003], the Domesday Book Mark II can’t be read. The BBC computers used for the project no longer work and the disks on which it was stored are not readable by other computer systems. But the 917-year-old original is still available to researchers in London’s Public Record Office.
This story underlines the second great archival challenge with electronic records: preservation across time. Whether made-digital records, like the Domesday Book, that so many archives are busily creating by scanning originals from their collections, or born-digital records like Eduard Mark’s office systems in the US Air Force, once these digital records have been created or captured, they must then be preserved across centuries – across centuries when each has an optimistic shelf life in digital format of perhaps 20 years before significant archival intervention is needed to refresh, migrate, or emulate the record to new formats, before it either disappears as unreadable or self-destructs physically.