Mathematics for safeguarding the nation’s digital memory, a talk by Dr Martine Barons (IMA Vice President, Learned Society / University of Warwick)
Abstract
Have you ever lost precious memories because of a hard drive or flash drive failure? What about that family wedding video sitting unseen on a VHS tape for which you no longer have a player? The National Archives have a responsibility to store and preserve government records and other material of national importance (for example, records of the London Olympics) for many decades. Whilst they have robust processes for paper records and for artefacts, more and more records are born digital or provided as digitised records. These are subject to all the frailties of obsolete hardware, deteriorating carriers and copying errors that we experience with our own data and records. In a joint project between the Applied Statistics & Risk Unit, Warwick and The National Archives we developed a probabilistic decision support system. Initially intended for UK use, lockdown serendipitously extended the project worldwide and allowed for the development of a professional GUI. This tool is now being used to assess the effects of different strategies on the risk to digital collections.
This talk will be given remotely, via Zoom. If you wish to register for attendance at this West Midlands branch talk, please contact Gemma Reeves who will provide the required details.
No charge is made to attend meetings. Non-IMA members are welcome.
There are (at least) 3 streams of issues here: (1) The obvious nature of security issues however the data is stored; these have been given, at best, token respect though more often almost have always remained ignored by designers, operations staff or governance; (2) The data that falls under legislated requirements to be kept, sometimes for centuries (e.g. the various Census records, criminal and financial or health records), and (3) the vastly greater volumes of often ephemeral data that wraps around society (e.g. literature, art, social communications, activity records, educational records, research and design documentation, etc.) . Half a long lifetime of trying to induce the Government, Financial and Health sectors to address this growing challenge leads me to wish this initiative well – even if it is 50 years too late for a significant proportion to be saved.