‘Bit Rot’ Can ‘Manifest’ on Any Storage Device, Says British Library Head Archivist

“Bit rot,” the progressive self-corruption of stored data (see 1709270048), “can manifest on any storage device, from floppy discs to hard drives,” Maureen Pennock, head of digital preservation at the British Library, told us. The library’s policy “is that content to be preserved is transferred to approved storage locations or workflows after acquisition and its bit-level integrity established so that it can be monitored thereafter,” said Pennock. The library recognized the challenges of digital preservation, and in the early 2000s “began developing our own purpose-built digital repository for long-term storage and management of our collection content,” she said. She described it as a “four-node replication system,” with copies of content and metadata packages placed in repository “nodes” located in Yorkshire, London, Wales and Scotland. The nodes undergo regular “fixity checking to ensure files have not become corrupt,” she said: “If fixity checks indicate a problem with a file on one node it can be replaced from one of the other nodes.”