Race against time to save electronic records

With software constantly changing and disks corrupting, archivists face a race against time to rescue information which is being stored electronically, on technology that is already becoming out of date.

Hull University's digital archivist Simon Wilson is now working alongside staff at the universities of Stanford, Yale and Virginia to develop methods of accessing and recording data which is stored on old computers drives and disks.

He said: "With paper, once we have stored it and placed it in acid free boxes we know we can leave it for 20 years or more and come back to it and it will still be intact. With digital information we can't do that as software can become out of date in just a few years.

"If I took something to our information technology department and told them to store it for 100 years they would just laugh as servers are replaced every three years."

Mr Wilson is currently working with digital material from novelist and Hull University graduate Stephen Gallagher along with records from the Socialist Health Association and the Mission to Seafarers charity.

He said: "Software too can become obsolete so quickly that we may reach a point in the not-too-distant future where even common file formats need specialist equipment to read them. Some of Stephen Gallagher's records are stored on Amstrad disks so we have had to find a machine that can take information from them."