Back to the Past of the Future

Although we’ve sadly not quite reached the stage where we’re about to find ourselves whizzing down the road in an attempt to reach the all important (and of course illegal) 88mph in a DeLorian just yet, the wonderful world of technology brought us one step closer to visiting the past this week.

Last week, The British Library announced the publication of the first batch of the planned 65 million digital scans of historic newspaper articles in the ‘British Newspaper Archive’, making them easily accessible for the public online.

Although on the one hand this might seem to be an incredibly tedious task to some (the team is currently digitising around 8,000 pages a day, a task expected to take around 10 years to complete) on the other hand, it’s great to see how digital technology is being harnessed to innovate (or perhaps more appropriately, renovate) such an outdated task.

Whereas researchers (or those with a general interest) would previously have been required to spend hours locked away in a dusty room with a stack of crumbling newspapers approaching four storeys high, they can now browse through the ages from the comfort of their own home, using nothing more than a laptop.

The British Newspaper Archive is ultimately another example of how most things seem to be going digital these days.

With the popularity of digital music such as iTunes and the more recent launch of Apple’s iCloud, the increasing trend of DVDs, coming with a (debatably) ‘free’ digital copy included and the rise of e-readers and e-books; the evidence all seems to point to the inevitable point at which everything has gone digital (or will at least be considering how it can go digital).

The question is; what’s going to be next? Or, perhaps slightly disconcertingly, where will it end?