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Filing the Past

by Marie Ørstedholm

The Danish National Archives at Christiansborg Palace contain substantation of the last 800 years’ of Danish history – in the shape of paper documents. Lined up one after the other they measure more than 30 kilometres. Shortly, new documents are only to be stored electronically.


Museums, archives, and authorities must digitalize their information and preferably also place it on the internet. Soon we shall be able to explore Denmark’s past in front of the home computer.

Digital information is space-saving. A CD-ROM can hold the contents of 450 ordinary diskettes or up to 200,000 A4 pages of text. The CD-ROM is sturdy and can be read without being worn. Once a CD-ROM has been "burnt", the contents can no longer be altered.

But electronics are becoming obsolete by lightening speed. New machines with new programmes cannot read the old data. Consequently, electronic archives must currently be adjusted to new, legible formats. Otherwise irreplaceable information will be lost. Re-formatting of old data requires that we keep and maintain old machines and programmes. Already now a lot of data is illegible because we have scrapped the machines too soon.

16 mm films are collecting dust in the attic next to the gramophone from ’75 and the ghetto blaster from ’87. The video cassette player cannot show the old beta film, and the floppy discs are too big for the pc.

Past perpetuated with old electronics can be hard to reach.


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