RECORDS chronicling modern life in Scotland will be lost to future generations, leading archivists have warned, despite digital archiving providing unprecedented capacity for storage.

Our descendents may only have fragments of evidence of how we live now, John Scally, the National Librarian, and Tim Ellis, the chief executive of the National Records of Scotland, have claimed.

The National Library of Scotland aims to retain three digital copies of key publications but cannot preserve everything, meaning important items will be lost.

Two hundred years from now, experts in Microsoft programming will be as highly prized as Latin experts are today, because it is likely few people will be able to access digital records easily, Mr Ellis said.

Mr Scally said the prospect of catastrophic loss of vital digital records “keeps me awake at night” and the decision by the legal deposit libraries to “effectively cease to take physical items and take the digital versions... is a point of possible anxiety for everyone”.

Addressing Holyrood’s culture committee, he added that to guard against “catastrophic loss,” such as wars or digital viruses, the libraries were working towards securing three digital copies of documents: on servers in Edinburgh and Glasgow and a third copy on a Cloud system.

One grave example where future generations were deprived of cultural records occurred during the 16th century Scottish Reformation with the destruction of a swathe of religious art, which Mr Scally branded a “huge act of vandalism”.

Echoing these concerns, Mr Ellis said preserving digital records in perpetuity was “very difficult”.

He said: “This is something that hasn’t really been solved anywhere. I agree with the principle of third [copies].

“It is also worth recognising that not everything will be preserved forever and that has always been the case. That is why we only have a handful of charters from the medieval period.

“Historians, 100, 200 years into the future will only have a handful of bits of information from the present day. Will they still be readable?

“We require experts in Latin now to handle medical charters and in 200 years’ time I suspect will require experts in Microsoft or whatever to understand the digital materials that we have now.”

He added that archivists typically appraise and select between five and 20 per cent of an organisation’s records to keep for long term posterity, but the digital era means more can be saved for the long term.

Mr Scally said the greatest potential dangers to data about our times are “intervention losses”, where catastrophic levels of information and culture are lost due to wars or other events or, in this era, viruses.

He said in Scottish history, one of these incidents was the Reformation of 1560.

He said one interpretation of that was as “a huge act of vandalism, right across culture – to destroy glass stained windows, to destroy books, to destroy all sorts of other things”.

He added: “What we want to avoid in the digital age is catastrophic loss of culture through viruses or various activities, which is why we talk about triplicates so we are storing the materials in multiple different places where the those hazards can be brought to as low level as possible.”