The Arctic World Archive – An Underground Digital ‘Time Capsule’ on the Arctic Island of Svalbard
Fintan McDonald and Albert Han of Context discuss Han’s tour of the Arctic World Archive, located in an underground cave on the Arctic island of Svalbard, Norway.
This “time capsule” is currently housing proprietary software from tech companies, documents from the Vatican Museum, and even the original hamburger recipe for McDonalds, and hopes to entice others to convert their memories onto their modern, high data digital film where it will be kept safe from harm.
The mission: to preserve human culture for future generations. And archivists like the Digital Preservation Coalition say they have a point: digital data is more fragile than many people realise. The lifespan of a typical storage solution – a hard drive, for example, is three-to-five years. Many early websites have decayed and disappeared, and cultural institutions with vast digital collections have been the target of cyber attacks.
