Georgia Davis is Sales & Marketing Executive at Exact Editions.
The destruction of the Library of Alexandria tends to conjure up images of a fire ignited by Julius Caesar's troops, engulfing centuries of painstakingly copied texts in one all-consuming blaze. In reality, historians suspect that the loss of the great library was a much more insidious process, contributed to by a lack of funding from the Imperial Roman government and the gradual decay of papyrus in a humid climate. Information is most often lost not with a bang, but with a whimper, a result of mismanagement and apathy. As historian Roger S. Bagnall puts it in his work on the Library of Alexandria, “Why should anyone be disillusioned by the realization that creative achievements survive only if we foster a cultural milieu that values them?”
Many years after the loss of this most famous of libraries, we can observe the same slow downward march resulting in digital data loss; files become decayed due to “bit rot” or are left unreadable by modern machines when unchanged. To associate information loss with cataclysm is dangerous, because it forgets that loss happens simply as a result of time passing, and is only prevented by regular, meticulous work, and a commitment to preserving archives.
The award winning 1987 film ‘Slow Fires: On the Preservation of the Human Record’ explores the growing awareness at that time that the embrittlement of paper due to acidity meant that much of humanity's written heritage contained the seeds of its own destruction. Come the end of the 20th century, an increasing number of old books would come to pieces in the hands of researchers - one librarian compared the choices that would need to be made at their institution to the lack of lifeboats on The Titanic - “who are the women and children of our collections?” she asks.
This Gordian Knot was not cut by the widescale digitisation of paper resources, however. At the National Archives’ Annual Lecture in 2025, Professor Nanna Bonde Thylstrup suggested that “Loss is not a failure of digital preservation but a structural feature” - an example used to illustrate this was the work at the Danish National Archives to convert excel spreadsheets into TIFF format. Excel is updated too often to keep the spreadsheets preserved in this form, and so TIFF is used as an alternative “dead format.” In converting the spreadsheets to TIFF, however, the data turned from a dynamic resource to a static image; it had lost its original value and purpose in the process of digitisation and preservation. A similar loss occurs when print magazine archives are digitised into purely plain text versions - the written content can be read, yes, but the formatting and feel of the original is completely lost.
So, saving human heritage requires not only the commitment to preserve archives, but the conversion of materials into forms which bear the original essence of the primary resource.
Exact Editions’ work with the organisation Portico aims to achieve this - the process of archiving and submitting files to Portico saves paper resources from loss and decay, while keeping the original feeling of the resource alive in spite of the structural loss of preservation. Portico’s approach to digital preservation is supported by the four pillars of usability, authenticity, discoverability, and accessibility. The organisation holds files in escrow to be released in the case of a “trigger event,” ensuring that content remains constantly updated and accessible. As Thylstrup says in her lecture, “Storage requires perpetual labour,” and Portico is in place to maintain this effort. Once the files are released, researchers can view a full list of issues and click into these to download a complete PDF, an exact copy of the content as seen on Exact Editions, which in turn was an exact scanned copy of the original print resource.
An archive recently completed and signed up to Portico was that of Apollo, an art periodical dating back to 1925. Apollo supplied 877 issues, scanned into PDF format. The images then went through a months-long process of OCR’ing, cropping, and combining into usable PDFs. The fully digitised Apollo archive is now periodically uploaded to Portico, meaning that the resource is preserved in as close a form to the original for posterity. Looking back to the very first 1925 issue, there is a piece written on domestic architecture by the famous historian and interior designer Murray Adams-Acton, F.S.A., which contains a scathing view of London’s streets:
“The charm and character of London seem to be passing. [...] How can one find repose in a city full of motor buses, huge death traps painted red-that hurtle through the streets, of buildings smothered in dazzling lights that stun one's brain, and wireless boxes that yell at one?”
One expert in the ‘Slow Fires’ film suggests that “The great task of libraries worldwide is the preservation of the ordinary” - magazine archives are inherently “ordinary”. They are and have been for popular consumption, containing the stories and opinions of individuals like Acton.
They may not always be peer reviewed, formal titles, but contain wonderful crystallisations of moments in history that give us fresh insights with every new article uncovered. Looking out from Exact Editions’ offices onto the hectic streets of Blackfriars, we have to wonder what Acton would think now, 100 years on from the Roaring Twenties. This comparison is all the more poignant when viewing a digital replica of the print, which looks identical to what a 1920s subscriber to Apollo would have received and held in their hands. By processing print archives into exact digital replicas of their print counterparts, we preserve the ordinary for research in as close a form to the original as possible, avoiding the looming loss of stories to paper decay and digital transformation.