Hacker News Reader

Comment by sooper | Hacker News Reader

I am really amazed that a ships log from 132 years ago was retained and is still available. Is this a common thing?

There are a lot of historical records that you'd never expect to have survived for so long in various archives.

There are massive archives of historical brewing data from various breweries in the UK dating back to the 1800s, this guy has a blog all about old British beer: http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com

There are also parish records for births, deaths, and marriages going back centuries in the UK as well as taxation records for centuries.

People love keeping records of things.

If you want to have a look at what weird things we still have records of, have a look at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/, it's a treasure trove of old data.

I wonder if in 200 years, they going to have people's browsing and location data from now. If yes that would be an unprecedented amount of records for historians.

I don't think so myself tbf, it's not very informative information - unless maybe it's about someone important or influential. I'm sure most of my internet comments I've left behind over the past decade - tens of thousands of them on numerous websites - will hover around for years to come, but I doubt they'd have historical significance unless I become famous somehow. The writings of Aaron Schwarz became eternalised in a way since his death, they're frequently getting "resurrected" on HN for example.

Given the way digital storage works, I guess it will be more like us looking at old Egiptian, Mayan, Romman, Greek artifacts while wondering what their purpose was.

I know the U.S. Navy permanently retains the deck logs of its commissioned ships. The ONRL has some logs dating back to 1776.

A permanent retention policy wasn't, apparently, the reason ONRL has those logs, as those records are identified as “records acquired from private citizens”. [0]

[0] https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/0...

Yes, the permanent retention policy came well after the days of the Continental Navy.

Those requirements are currently set out in SECNAV M-5210.1. Nowadays, they're maintained by NAVHISTHERITAGECOM and then transferred to the National Archives after 30-years.

It's one of the primary methods to study historical weather patterns.

Archives of the Royal Navy officers logs seems to date back the 1660s.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/r...

The archives of the Spanish Archive of the Indies are a century older than that, and if the Portuguese Casa da Índia hadn't been destroyed in the great 1755 earthquake we'd have sailing records from the dawn of the Age of Discoveries. The records and maps were national secrets, and for good reason.

You do wonder if the NSA will declassify its records 100 years from now.

They have even older documents in Simancas

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo_General_de_Simancas

This is interesting too. A less detailed class of records, but older.

http://www.medievalandtudorships.org/database/

Interesting if digital records will be quite as permanent as paper record; Will the problem of data loss be solved some day? Hard to know.

Depends on whether they're just being used for day-to-day work or, like a ship's log, they're actively getting archived. I think atm, printing and storing is still the way to go with that.

I guess that once it's archived, it tends to stay that way.

Unless it doesn't.

"Over time, all data approaches deleted, or public." -- Quinn Norton.

Libraries have various traditions of burning. Alexandria (probably several times). The U.S. Library of Congress, in 1814, 1851, and 1825.

http://www.accessible-archives.com/2013/01/the-other-fire-at...

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/22/this-day-in-politi...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com