3874 entries. Last updated May 25, 2013.

Preservation & Conservation of Information Timeline Outline

  • Eras
  • Themes

1,000 BCE – 300 BCE

The Royal Library of Alexandria: The Largest Collection of Recorded Information…
(Circa 300 BCE)

300 BCE – 30 CE

The Portland Vase. Shown is the first of two scenes. (View Larger)
The Portland Vase: Classical Connoisseurship, Influence, Destruction &…
(30 BCE – 25 CE)

30 CE – 500 CE

Papyrus recovered from the Villa of the Papyri
The Only Library Preserved Intact from Roman Times
(79 CE)

An inscription depicting a contemporaneous politician. (View Larger)
Over 11,000 Wall Inscriptions Survived from Pompeii
(79 CE)

A map of Israel, with Caesarea Maritima highlightd in blue. (View Larger)
Pamphilus Establishes a Library and Scriptorium and is Executed During…
(275 CE – 309 CE)

700 – 800

The first page of the Beowulf manuscript. (View Larger)
Beowulf
(700 – 1000)

800 – 900

Folio 241b of MS Leiden Or. 298, a manuscript of the 'Gharib al-Hadith' by Abu `Ubayd al-Qasim b. Sallam. (View Larger)
The Oldest Arabic Manuscript on Arabic Paper Preserved in Europe
(November – December 867)

1000 – 1100

A scene from the Bayeux tapestry, showing Odo, Archbishop of Canterbury, on horseback. (View Larger)
The Norman Conquest Recorded on the Bayeux Tapestry
(1077)

1100 – 1200

At Martorana in Palermo, Italy, a mural depicting the divine coronation of Roger II. (View Larger)
King Roger Bans the Use of Paper
(1145)

T-S_10Ka4.1,r: a page from an early autograph draft of Maimonides's 'Guide for the Perplexed.' (View Larger)
Early Autograph Draft of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed
(Circa 1185)

1200 – 1300

Portrait of Michael VII Palaiologos. (View Larger)
Michael VIII Palaiologos Reestablishes the Imperial Library
(1261)

1300 – 1400

The seal of Richard de Bury. (View Larger)
Philobiblon
(1345)

1450 – 1500

Discovery of a Lost Painting by Michelangelo?
(1487 – 1488)

The Best Medium for Long Term Information Storage
(1494)

1550 – 1600

The First Major Antiquarian Collection Assembled in England
(1568)

Perhaps the Most Important Private Collection of Manuscripts Ever Collected in England
(1588 – 1631)

1600 – 1650

The library at Hereford Cathedral. (View Larger)
The Largest Historic Chained Library in the World
(1611)

1650 – 1700

A Universal Language Based on a Classification Scheme or Ontology, and a Universal System of Measurement
(1668)

1750 – 1800

Printing as a Way to Preserve Information
(February 18, 1791)

1800 – 1850

Manual of Lithography, Bookbinding, and Cleaning and Restoring Paper
(1818 – 1824)

Michael Faraday on Decay in Leather Bookbindings
(April 7, 1843)

Papermaking from Wood Pulp Rediscovered & Industrialized
(October 26, 1844 – August 1845)

The First Book on the Restoration of Rare Books and their Bindings
(1846)

1850 – 1875

Using Microphotography for Document Preservation
(1851 – 1852)

The Sulfite Pulping Process for Manufacturing Paper
(1866)

1875 – 1900

Listening to the Earliest Surviving Recording of a Musical Performance
(June 22, 1878 – October 2012)

One of the Most Dramatic Problems in the Preservation of Media
(1889)

The Largest and Most Diverse Collection of Medieval Manuscripts in the World
(1896 – 1902)

The Questionable Quality of Paper
(1898)

1900 – 1910

Revealing a Hidden Image in a Newspaper Article
(1901 – October 24, 2012)

Problems with Leather Used in Bookbinding
(1905)

The Photomicrographic Book
(1907)

1930 – 1940

The Bettmann Archive; the Beginning of the Visual Age
(1938)

1940 – 1950

The Fitzwilliam Museum Exhibition of Printing: Precursor to "Printing and the Mind of Man"
(May 6 – May 16, 1940)

Sealing of the Crypt of Civlization
(May 25, 1940)

1950 – 1960

Archival Records Include "Machine-Readable Materials"
(1950)

One of the Earliest Surviving British Television Dramas
(December 12 – December 14, 1954)

Longevity of Paper is a Function of its Acidity or Alkalinity
(Circa 1958)

1960 – 1970

The Largest Archive of Digital Social Science Data
(1962)

The Smallest Published Edition of the Bible, and the First to Reach the Moon
(1966)

1970 – 1980

Acquiring New Archival Material at the Rate of 1 Mile per Year
(Circa 1970)

Launching "Messages in a Bottle" into the Cosmic Ocean
(1977)

1980 – 1990

Flexible Image Transport System (FITS)
(1981)

U.S. Newspaper Program Microfilms Newspapers
(1982)

The Digital Domesday Project--Doomed to Early Digital Obsolescence
(1984 – 1986)

The Perseus Digital Library Project
(1985)

Among the Earliest Practical Digital Libraries
(1985)

The First Digital Image Database of Cultural Materials
(1987)

Slow Fires
(1987)

1990 – 2000

The Memory of the World Program
(1992)

Preserving Access to Digital Information
(1993)

The Electronic Beowulf
(1993)

The First Sourcebook on Digital Libraries?
(December 6, 1993)

NSF Digital Libraries Initiative
(1994)

Digital Library: Gross Structure and Requirements
(March 1, 1994)

The Digital Library Federation is Founded
(May 1, 1994)

The Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries
(June 19 – June 21, 1994)

The National Digital Library Program is Announced
(October 13, 1994)

Task Force on Digital Archiving
(December 1994)

Online Searchable Archive of Over 1000 Academic Journals
(1995)

D-Lib Magazine
(July 1995)

The Kulturarw3 Project
(1996)

Brewster Kahle Founds the Internet Archive
(1996)

LexisNexis Exceeds One Billion Documents
(1996)

The First ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries
(March 20 – March 23, 1996)

IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries
(1997)

California Digital Library
(1997)

RLG DigiNews Begins Publication
(April 15, 1997)

Origins of Australia's Web Archive
(1998)

NARA Begins ERA for Preservation of Digital Archives
(1998)

On the Preservation of Knowledge in the Electronic Age
(1998)

The Digital Michelangelo Project
(1998)

Storing Public Records Electronically
(1999)

"Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe"
(1999)

Continuing to Print the British Parliamentary Papers on Vellum
(November 2, 1999)

2000 – 2005

Over 5,000,000 Items in the National Digital Library Program
(2000)

MINERVA to Preserve Open-Access Web Resources
(2000)

The Wayback Machine
(2001)

High Density Rosetta Archival Preservation Technology
(2001)

The Digital Preservation Coalition
(January 2001)

Open Archival Information System
(January 2001)

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper
(April 2001)

Trusted Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities
(May 2002)

How Much Information?
(2003)

Collecting and Preserving the World Wide Web
(February 23, 2003)

The First Automatic Page-Turning Scanner
(April 7 – April 9, 2003)

Netpreserve.org
(July 2003)

OCLC Serves More than 50,000 Libraries, Contains 56 Million Records
(2004)

Approximately 530 miles of Bookshelves
(2004)

The National Digital Newspaper Program
(March 2004)

The Google Print Project
(October 2004)

2005 – 2010

40,000,000,000 Web Pages Archived
(2005)

From the Sixth Century to the Twenty-First
(2005)

Proposal for a World Digital Library
(June 6, 2005)

Moratorium on Scanning Books
(August 11, 2005)

Electronic Records Archives System
(September 8, 2005)

Preservation of Digital Objects
(September 15 – September 16, 2005)

Google Print Morphs in Two
(October 2005)

The Genetic Code of Avian Flu Virus H5N1 is Deciphered
(October 5, 2005)

A Plan to Create a World Digital Library
(November 11, 2005)

Google Books
(December 2005)

Maybe the World's Largest Physical Library
(December 2005)

The Heritage Health Index Report on the State of America's Collections
(December 2005)

The Wayback Machine
(2006)

Data Curation as a Profession
(2006)

A Research Library Based on Historical Collections of the Internet Archive
(February 2006)

World Wide Web History Center
(March 2006)

Studies on Digital Library Evolution
(March 2006)

Damage to Codex Atlanticus Caused by Efforts at Preservation
(April 2006)

A Critical Review at the Library of Congress
(April 3, 2006)

"The entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages" would amount to 50 petabytes of data.
(May 14, 2006)

OCLC Merges with RLG
(July 1, 2006)

The Royal Society Digital Journal Archive
(October 29, 2006)

Previously Unknown Speeches by Hyperides
(November 2006)

The EPA Begins to Close its Scientific Libraries
(November 20, 2006)

Demanding that the U.S. EPA Desist from Destroying its Libraries
(November 30, 2006)

A Printed Book on Preserving Digital Information
(2007)

Data-Storing Bacteria Could Last Thousands of Years
(February 27, 2007)

It Would Take 1800 Years to Convert the Paper Records . . . .
(March 10, 2007)

DROID, an Archives Analysis and Identification Tool
(September 27, 2007)

The World's Oldest Oil Paintings Restored After Taliban Dynamite
(February 19, 2008)

The Effect of Decay Fungi on Wood Used in the Production of Violins
(June 28, 2008)

Creation of the HathiTrust Digital Library
(October 2008 – March 2012)

Raphael's Madonna of the Goldfinch Restored 450 Years after it was Nearly Destroyed
(October 30, 2008)

The WARC Format as an International File Preservation Standard
(June 1, 2009)

Costs of Managed Archiving versus Passive Archiving of Data
(June 4, 2009)

'Material Degradomics" or, The Sniff Test
(September 17, 2009)

" A Library to Last Forever" ??
(October 9, 2009)

2010 – 2011

Biological Journals to Require Data-Archiving
(January 2010)

The Vatican Library Plans the Scanning of all its Manuscripts into the FITS Document Format
(March 24, 2010)

The Library of Congress to Preserve All "Tweets"
(April 14, 2010)

Using the Twitter Archive for Historical Research
(April 30, 2010)

2011 – 2013

Universal Music Group Donates a "Mile of Music" to the Library of Congress
(January 10, 2011)

The Expanding Digital Universe: Surpassing 1.8 Zetabytes
(June 2011)

"Physical Archiving is Still an Important Function in the Digital Era."The Internet Archive Builds an Archive of Physical Books
(June 6, 2011)

Leonardo's Lost Painting, Salvator Mundi, Discovered
(July 10, 2011)

Sheikh Sultan Dr. Al-Qasimi Pledges to Restore the Library of l'Institut de l'Egypte
(December 20, 2011)

Gelatin and Calcium in the Earliest Paper Was Responsible for its Longevity
(January 2012)

Digitizing the Oldest Monastic Library
(May 2012)

The Secret Race to Save Manuscripts in Timbuktu and Djenne
(December 27, 2012)

2013 – Present

"Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories"
(January 2013)

The Library of Congress Has Archived 170 Billion Tweets
(January 4, 2013)

Part of Library of the Ahmed Baba Institute in Timbuktu is Burned
(January 28 – January 30, 2013)

The Historic Vatican Library to be Digitized in 2.8 Petabytes
(March 7, 2013)