Currently, our digital collections represent only a tiny proportion of our overall collections. Going forward, though, collecting and caring for material which has been ‘born digital’ will become increasingly important if we want our collections to continue to reflect life in our area.
Take one example, photographs. Like most archives, we have large collections of photographs dating back to the earliest days of photography in the mid-19th century. With the advent of digital photography, and especially smart phones, people take far more photos than they ever have before but how many of these will ever make it into the archival collections of the future? Many of our photographs, like much else in our collections, have come to us from people going through old family possessions and not wanting to just throw them away. Who, now or in the future, is going to wade through thousands upon thousands of digital photographs stored on phones, in the cloud or on home computers and think ‘these might be useful to the local archive’?
Aside from the problems of convincing people to think to donate digital photographs there are technological issues with preserving them when they do. ‘Born digital’ items of any sort are incredibly vulnerable – to accidental deletion, corruption of the hardware they are stored on, long-term changes in the file formats and the computer software and hardware used to access them and through ‘bit rot’ amongst other things. We store our physical photographs in environmentally controlled and secure storage in our archive strongroom and there is no problem with producing a 150 year old photograph for a customer to view. Imagine how we might ensure that in a 150 years time someone can open and view a JPEG file created today.
During the last year Conwy Archives have become users of the commercial digital preservation system, Preservica, to help us ensure the long-term security and usability of all our digital collections including digital photographs. This means that digital photographs such as this one recording the 2025 Conwy Honey Fair:
will be preserved to document this ancient fair (dating back more than 700 years) alongside our physical photographs of the fair like this one taken around 1950:
Our future photographs will tell as much of a story as the ones from our past, and as we enter further into the digital age and JPEGSs and TIFF’s become the new polaroid and film, digital preservation is more important than ever for the safeguarding of our history.
Elisabeth Parfitt, Conwy Archives
https://conwyculture.com/about-culture/archives
