History Or Hoarding? With Annabel Crabb
Jun 2, 2026 · 25 min · 9 segments
Something is rotting, deep in the stacks of Australia's oldest library. It's microfilm. Annabel Crabb dives into the unsettling world of historical preservation in the age of digital storage, asking…
Matthew BurgessGuestMaggie PattonGuestNo entities detected.
It's the matter of hoarding digital things forever, which is not as easy as it sounds.
It turns out my childlike faith that digital things, you know, things that are in the cloud, will live forever, is seriously, seriously misguided.
[gentle music] Basically, it doesn't matter whether something has been digitized, so that's a digital representation of a physical item-
It needs digital preservation, so it needs active and ongoing care over time.
We walked with Maggie down deep in the bowels of the building, and she opened up these drawers of microfilm-
So what's the equivalent of that in material that's always been online? How can they go a bit funny over time?
Yeah, so I mean, if we look at just digital files, um, they can have what we call is bit rot.
It's the matter of hoarding digital things forever, which is not as easy as it sounds.
It turns out my childlike faith that digital things, you know, things that are in the cloud, will live forever, is seriously, seriously misguided.
[gentle music] Basically, it doesn't matter whether something has been digitized, so that's a digital representation of a physical item-
It needs digital preservation, so it needs active and ongoing care over time.
We walked with Maggie down deep in the bowels of the building, and she opened up these drawers of microfilm-
So what's the equivalent of that in material that's always been online? How can they go a bit funny over time?
Yeah, so I mean, if we look at just digital files, um, they can have what we call is bit rot.
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