Every second, thousands of photos and articles are put on websites and social media, mostly uploaded through a phone with no physical copy of the file existing.
As social media remains a central form of communication, the University’s digital archiving team is thinking about how future historians and biographers will piece together our lives without bundles of diaries, paper letters and professional correspondence.
Alice Austin started off as a traditional archivist before working on preserving webpages, photographs and digital documents.
“It’s a bit of a strange job,” she says. “Half of my job is trying to get people to think of the web as just as important as the old bits of paper that the University library has been holding on to for hundreds of years.
“In 50 years it’s going to be websites that people want to look at to try and work out what on earth was going on and all these digital files disappear quickly.”
Digital archiving work isn’t getting any easier as websites today are highly dynamic, changing with every refresh.
Alice says: “Every single person I know has lost photos that they only had on Facebook, Instagram or another social media platform. It’s hard to get people to think about digital files as being more vulnerable than a piece of paper but they really are.”
Research from Orbit Media in 2021 found the average lifespan of a website is two years and seven months but some web pages can be deleted in a matter of hours, particularly if they are of a politically sensitive nature. Read the research from Orbit Media here.
Alice’s PhD research focused on how the National Library of Scotland collected a record of the independence referendum and what that record would look like to historians in the future.
“I think a lot of political archives tend to come to places like the National Library when a politician retires at the end of their career but the likelihood that they’re going to have the digital files to be able to pass on is much less likely because it takes a lot more work.
“How are we going to tell the history of historical events like Covid when we haven’t got letters that are getting sent between politicians anymore? It’s all in WhatsApp and email and can just be deleted with the press of a button.”
Alice says the pandemic made the public aware of the importance of digital archiving as more of our work and personal lives moved online: “It made us all realise like if somebody comes to try and tell the history of the Covid pandemic in 20 years’ time, they’re going to have to be looking at digital stuff and I just don’t know if they’ll find it in the same way as we’ve got from the pandemic in 1919.
“It’s kind of sad to think about, but I think it’s made people realise how much history has been only recorded digitally now.”
With a multitude of approaches, digital archiving may seem a daunting task, but Alice says we will reap the rewards of preserving digital data: “It seems strange to think about trying to organize things for the archive before you’ve even started, but it’s so necessary.
“It’s amazing to be able to show academics and students lecture notes someone was taking in 1750 from a science lecture and getting them to think about the record that they are creating in that way and then they realise the material they have is actually really valuable in charting the history of the University.
“People think it can be quite a technical process but there are some really straightforward and easy-to-use free tools out there and anyone who is creating stuff digitally – whether that be word documents or databases or websites – should be thinking about this, because we want to make sure that hard work doesn’t get lost and that we can carry on championing all the good work that they did in the future.”
Find out more about the University’s Digital Archives and Preservation team’s work