‘Digital Archaeological Gap’ Hitting Central Asia Especially Hard

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 16 – Many assume, the Bugin portal says, that digitalization has made documents immortal; but the reality in Central Asia – and not just there – is that “digital memory is proving less durable than that kept on paper and electronic files far more vulnerable to decay than an ancient manuscript.”

            As a result, the current faith that digitalization will save the situation may mean, the portal continues, that future students of the past “may know more about life in cities from two millenia ago than about the daily lives of people who lived in the internet age” (bugin.info/detail/khrupche-drevnikh-ruin-kak/ru).

“It is commonly assumed that digital information is immortal, yet the reality is quite the opposite. Files constantly require migration to new devices, as operating systems, storage standards, and software evolve. A document saved thirty years ago often cannot be opened using modern software,” Bugin says.

              “In Central Asia,” it continues, “this issue is compounded by the uneven pace of digitalization. While state archives are gradually transitioning to electronic storage systems, municipal institutions, local newspaper offices, rural libraries, cultural centers, and small museums often operate with limited resources.”

            “The avalanche-like growth in the volume of information being created … works against preservation because people stop organizing their archives and rely instead on cloud services, social media or phone storage;” and this is leading to “the emergence of a new phenomenon: ‘the digital archaeological gap.”

            Paradoxically, this gap is why “we sometimes know more about the life of a person from the 19^th century than we do about someone from the early 21^st,” Bugin says. That is true in many places, but Central Asia faces especial challenges because of the high mobility of the population, climate which works against preservation, and the shortage of efforts to save archives.

            What is an especially important task now, the portal says, is “establishing unified preservation standards: File formats, backup systems, metadata requirements, cataloguing methods, and interoperability of archival platforms are becoming just as important as the documents themselves.”

            If those issues are not addressed now and solutions found, even “digital collections risk becoming fragmented data sets that no one will be able to use only a few decades from now,” Bugin concludes.