The National Archives has struck a deal to take the first step in digitising its collection.
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The $1.4 million three-year contract with digital preservation platform Preservica, is the first step towards digitising the archives, a process which in its entirety would take decades.
"The job of digitising the collection will take much longer than my lifetime," National Archives director-general David Fricker said.
"What we're doing is prioritising and making sure the most urgent, at risk items are being digitised and will be kept on this digital platform."
Modern history, created daily as the Australian government navigated the pandemic, would be among the first items to be stored on the platform.
Mr Fricker said there was already a swathe of content amounting to five petabytes, or 5 million gigabytes.
"We remember so much about the First World War and what Australia went through, and yet we remember so little about the Spanish flu and what we went through to recover," he said.
"It feels like we have to learn it all again now.
"So this time, we have to keep the memory of this COVID-19 pandemic, so that next time Australia faces a pandemic we're ready for it."
The platform will also allow the critical digitisation of material stored on magnetic tape, which archivists say would be lost forever if not completed by 2025.
Records of extinct, or soon to be extinct, Indigenous languages and First Nations policies would be among the highest priority items.
Scientific material and content from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, and that of national broadcasters SBS and ABC, would also be first in line.
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"I'm very happy we've started the journey with Preservica to give us the capacity and ability to preserve this sort of material," Mr Fricker said.
"The preservation of documents within this Presevica product are constantly being maintained and kept up to date with new and emerging technology."
"So, we're carrying that memory forward so people 10, 20, 1000 years from now will still be able to access the memories we're creating in Australia today."
This is just one very small step in a colossal undertaking. Mr Fricker said last month, the entirety of the extensive collection would not be saved.
"We have about 150,000 hours of audio-visual material we need to rescue off magnetic tape," he said.
"We have 380 shelf kilometers that should be digitised to be made available to Australians.
"The digitisation of the entire collection of the archives is a very long journey indeed, we're still at the beginning of that."
The archives would continue to look to expand digital storage capacity and its volunteer network.