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April 5, 2002

Our useless digital archives

Our useless digital archives, from WriteTheWeb. The BBC created a 'Domesday' project in 1986 to document the state of the empire.  Now, 15 years later, this article claims that the discs that were created for the project are unreadable.

It's almost certainly true that the data is completely gone; we're not talking about 60's era magtapes that fall apart when you touch them.  But it's probably true that it would take some investment of time and money to get what's off them.  It's probably not worth it; even though the original project cost 2.5m pounds.

I'm convinced that Digital Archeology will be a big field in the years to come, given all the multimedia we've created over the last 50 years that requires machinery to decode it.