Archives of the Future

In 2003, Roy Rosenzweig framed digital preservation around a paradox of scarcity and abundance. Two decades later, the same problem operates at a vastly greater scale and under more concentrated infrastructural conditions. Global data volume was projected to reach approximately 181 zettabytes in 2025, enough, if stored on 25 GB Blu-ray discs, to produce a stack extending some twenty-one times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The vulnerability of digital records that concerned Rosenzweig has only become more consequential at this scale. Today’s big data are distributed across servers, data centres, and networks, even as ownership and computing capacity have become increasingly concentrated among a handful of technology firms. Much of the digital record persists in systems where replication, migration, modification, and deletion are ordinary operations, governed by priorities that rarely include long-term preservation or cultural heritage. An age of unprecedented information abundance will leave future historians with only scattered remnants of the digital present.

Existing preservation efforts make the disparity visible. Between 1996 and 2020, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine accumulated some 733 billion web objects comprising approximately 70 petabytes, an extraordinary achievement set against the 59 zettabytes of data produced globally in 2020 alone, a difference approaching six orders of magnitude. The quantities describe different bodies of information and are not directly comparable, but their disparity conveys something of the scale confronting digital preservation. Scale, however, is only part of the problem. Much of the contemporary record does not exist as a bounded object awaiting preservation. Social media records, sensor outputs, user behaviour data, audiovisual streams, and machine-generated materials are sharded, replicated, cached, recombined, migrated, and purged in the ordinary operation of the systems that produce them. There may be no singular authoritative copy to deposit in an archive, and the interfaces, metadata, software, or computational contexts required to interpret a surviving copy may disappear before the copy itself.

Archives of the Future studies this pre-archival history of digital evidence. Preservation forms one part of a larger problem encompassing production, transmission, migration, authentication, ownership, access, and disappearance. A record documented as destroyed, one that was never captured, one known to exist but presently inaccessible, and one whose fate cannot be established present different evidentiary conditions; only the first establishes loss. BDSL documents these processes while the systems concerned remain observable, combining field research and interviews with technical papers, standards, patents, white papers, legal proceedings, and direct investigation of contemporary digital infrastructure. The objective is to leave future humanities researchers evidence of how the digital present was created, circulated, transformed, preserved, and lost, so that whatever survives can be read in relation to the systems and contingencies that produced the remainder.