There's an excellent example of how a digital archive can quickly run into problems.
Between 1984-86 the BBC Domesday Project engaged more than a million people from around Britain.
Children at more than 9,000 schools helped compile a statistical survey, personal thoughts and memories. The data was stored on special laserdiscs, then seen as a technology of the future.
Nearly two decades later, there were virtually no extant disc players able to read the specially formatted discs. After a lot of work, the data was made readable, but the case for digital archiving had suffered a setback.
"Examples like that imply that digital is more fragile than physical," Mitcham laments.
Mike Tibbetts, one of the two creators of the Domesday Project, wrote in 2008, external that "the fault in all this lies not in the lack of vision or foresight by the technologists but that, at least in the UK, the national systems of data preservation and heritage archiving simply don't work reliably or consistently."
This is the issue, according to Jenny Mitcham. Just as preserving a physical archive requires careful consideration of temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure to prevent paper from turning brittle and breaking, so digital archives need to be tended to.
"There's certainly truth in the fact that if [a] digital [format] is neglected, it'll become obsolete," she says. "But if it's brought into a digital archive, and that digital archive is well set up and knows what it's doing, migrating and actively managing files over time, the chances those files will be readable in the future are vastly improved."
Adrian Brown lists the difficulties in maintaining paper records - "decay, chemical changes that happen in the physical items; you've got insects and animal damage; the effects of temperature and light and humidity and dust. Tearing, rubbing, those kinds of issues."
But with digital, there are different risks. "One of the things about digital information is that it's not fundamentally human-readable," he explains. "You need some kind of technology to turn it into something understandable. Technology as we know changes very rapidly; what you can find is your way of turning those 1s and 0s into meaningful information can be threatened if you don't take precautions."
And, as anyone who has lost beloved holiday snaps to a hard drive failure knows, IT systems are far from infallible.
"With digital, the last thing you want to do is put it somewhere and leave it alone," Mitcham says. "There are things you need to do over time to make sure everything's OK with it."
Documents are migrated from one file format to another as old versions of applications become outdated. It's also necessary to check information hasn't been lost in the transition.
Backup copies are continuously made, and placed in different locations. Checksums, a process to make sure errors have not wormed their way into files, are run weekly.
So archives are indeed moving from pieces of paper to bits and bytes. The British Library keep a physical copy of every book, magazine and newspaper printed in the United Kingdom as part of the principle of "legal deposit", a law which has existed since 1662.
But since 2013, electronic records of websites, blogs, CDs and electronic journals have also come under the catchment of the legal deposit law.
Advocates point out digital records have their advantages over paper documents.
Metadata associated with electronic files can give an insight into the messy creation of a work, rather than a polished final document. It's sometimes possible to view how long someone spent typing up a record, and even to see what they changed between drafts.
And just as with 500-year-old vellum, there's history in our hard drives, too.
"I get excited by digital archaeology," Mitcham admits. "If you find a pile of 5¼ inch floppy disks, I get a buzz out of that. Being able to find out what's on those discs, look through old Wordstar files, and get an idea for how computing has moved on through time, that's fascinating."
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