In January 2022 The National Archives made public the 1921 census, taken on 19th June 1921. They said: "It has taken a team of hundreds of conservators, technicians and transcribers almost three years to conserve and digitise more than 30,000 bound volumes of original documents, stored on 1.6 linear kilometres of shelving, ahead of publication today."
Now that this precious information is available in digital form, how can researchers and archivists ensure that it remains available as technologies become obsolete and digital storage mediums deteriorate?
In this talk, Dr Martine Barons will describe a recent project she and her AS&RU team did with The National Archives (TNA) to identify the risks to digital archives using probabilistic modelling. This mathematical model became a tool - DiAGRAM - which TNA continues to use to decide how best to spend the resources available to it for greatest effect.