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Christian Kriticos BBC
yesterday From lectures by Stephen Hawking to the letters of British politician Neil Kinnock – it's a race against time to save the historical treasures locked away on old floppy disks. Some of the world's most treasured documents can be found deep in the archives of Cambridge University Library. There are letters from Sir Isaac Newton, notebooks belonging to Charles Darwin, rare Islamic texts and the Nash Papyrus – fragments of a sheet from 200BC containing the Ten Commandments written in Hebrew. These rare, and often unique, manuscripts are safely stored in climate-controlled environments while staff tenderly care for them to prevent the delicate pages from crumbling and ink from flaking away. But when the library received 113 boxes of papers and mementoes from the office of physicist Stephen Hawking, it found itself with an unusual challenge. Tucked alongside the letters, photographs and thousands of pages relating to Hawking's work on theoretical physics, were items now not commonly seen in modern offices – floppy disks. They were the result of Hawking's , which he was able to use despite having a form of motor neurone disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, thanks to modifications and software. Locked inside these disks could be all kinds of forgotten information or previously unknown insights into the scientists' life. The archivists' minds boggled. These disks are now part of a project at Cambridge University Library to rescue hidden knowledge trapped on floppy disks. The Future Nostalgia project reflects a larger trend in the information flooding into archives and libraries around the world. "Most of the donations we get are from people who are either retiring or passing away," explains Leontien Talboom, a member of the library's digital preservation team who is leading the project. "That means we're seeing more and more things from the era of personal computing." At first, the durable plastic of floppy disks, popular from the 1970s to the 1990s, may seem more secure than fragile manuscripts. Paper rots, ink fades and runs. Synthetic materials can last much longer – that is, after all, why plastic pollution is such a concern. But the digital information saved inside these rigid cassettes is more vulnerable than you might think. The iron oxide that coats the thin layer of plastic inside can degrade and lose its magnetism over time. This means the data could be lost forever. Legacy data storage devices like floppy disks therefore present serious complications for archivists. "If you've got a book, it doesn't matter how old it is – you can still read it," Talboom says (provided you understand the language it is written in, of course). With floppy disks, however, you need specialised equipment just to access the content itself – it is like requiring a key to open a book. Even then you might not be able to read what is inside. "You need to know a lot about the systems where these floppy disks were formatted too," says Talboom. This has created concerns among archivists, historians and archaeologists that future generations may face a sort of "digital dark age" when they look back for material from the past 50 years or so. Much like the Dark Ages of Europe that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, it's not that nothing happened. But if no records from the time exist, then it will be impossible to know what people thought, felt and how they lived. To address this challenge, the Future........
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