So are we headed for a digital dark age?

 Yes and no.

My little blogpost yesterday about the slow death of the postal service brought to mind some of the problems brought about by the demise of physical documents.

While we can still read a 150 year old postcard we may struggle to read a 10 year old Microsoft chat message. 

For official records this not a great problem.

At a governmental level there have been a range of initiatives to avoid the loss of access to contents due to obselesence of both hardware and software.

And having worked in both digital archiving and digital preservation I know it can be done. But I also know it's not necessarily cheap.

In digital preservation there are two and a half problems - old hardware used to store the data, old and undocumented data formats, and once you've retrieved it, how to stop it happening again.

Data can be stored on a variety of physical media. Physical media has its own problems with degradation especially if it has been stored in a less than optimal manner, but on the whole most media from the last twenty or thirty years can be read if you have access to the correct device to read it.

Of course, access to the correct media is the key - and not all media is the same - take the humble 3.5" disk - could be written in the common DOS style 1.44MB format, the less common early Macintosh variable speed 800k format, or some strange format used by early Apricot computers (Long gone now, but once the flagship of the UK domestic PC industry and widely adopted by government and large hospitals at the time).

And sometimes the media is just weird - such as the strange 3" disks used by Amstrad PCW machines that were wildly popular in the UK in the late eighties and early nineties.

And of course the format that the data is written in can be incomprehensible to modern software, although both AbiWord and LibreOffice are quite good at reading a range of legacy word processor formats.

If you belong to reasonably well funded body, such as a university or government sponsored archive service this basically resolves to a set of technical problems, which when solved, allows you to extract the contents of text documents into a useful format. 

Mail can be trickier, but actually the original Unix mbox format was simply a lot of concatenated message bodies, it's usually possible to snip the messages apart with a little programming.

What however does the amateur or family historian do?

They don't have the expertise, or even access to suitable hardware to read all the notes that Aunty Ethel put together on her old Amstrad, or even her old Mac Classic using Claris Works.

Unless she printed them out and put them in a binder, they're essentially lost, so while we might be able to read Great Uncle Jack's letters, we can't actually read Ethel's notes and information gleaned from talking to family members.

And that's a problem.

Ethel may no longer be with us. If Ethel had done a reasonable amount of work talking to people who actually knew Jack, and perhaps interviewing them semi formally, we might have a valuable resource, which can't be repeated as the people who knew Jack have also passed on.

While the image of the amateur family historian might be of some bumbly old person in a battered cardigan (and that can be uncomfortably close to the truth in some cases) a lot of them do good work and are educated people who had professional jobs and who turned to family history in retirement as a way of maintaining their skills.

So a digital dark age?

For official records, probably not, always of course barring a major catastrophe. For small scale amateur history I think we are as technological drift means the paper trail of letters comes to a halt sometime after 1990 when people started regularly having computers at home ...