To celebrate the 1000th anniversary of the Domesday Book in 1986, the BBC decided to create a multimedia computer based version. Now the 12 inch disks which contain the information are unreadable because the technology is obsolete. The irony is that while you can still read the original 11th century version, the 20th century digital copy took less than 15 years to become utterly redundant.

We aren't any further forward here at the start of the 21st century. The concept of digital archiving is so low on the agenda for most people, yet information is increasingly published in digital form only. This is dangerous. Information is essential for democratic societies to exist, so a situation where we keep losing information through a lack of any coherent archiving policy lessens our ability to be truly democratic.