Digitisation is a colossal effort for any institution. It relies on volunteers or cash-strapped doctoral candidates scanning, photographing, or typing word-for-word existing documents. The National Archives, which hold 11 million historical government and public records, are in the habit of proudly posting photographs on their Twitter page of volunteers scanning Great War Service Records. And it is expensive. The Tate project was possible only with a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £2million. A project to digitise the Vatican Library’s 82,000 manuscripts—the first 4,400 were made available online last October—is expected to cost more than $50million (£34million)

Happily, the UK leads the world in what is called “Open Data Readiness”—archival material that is free to access, searchable and online. The 2015 “Barometer Report”, commissioned by the World Wide Web Foundation, puts us top for Open Data  Readiness. The US is in second place, followed by Sweden, France and New Zealand.

The records of Hansard, the daily transcription of proceedings in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, for example, have been put online. The earliest entry is from 1803.  Meanwhile, the National Archives, are being—painstakingly—digitised. On one recent rummage through curiosities I came across an 1866 patent for an ornamental bar of soap shaped liked a plucked and trussed chicken.

Some historians and biographers fret that today’s politicians, writers and artists will not leave behind the correspondence and diaries their predecessors did. There will be nothing to compare with the literary estates of a Virginia Woolf, a Ted Hughes or a Winston Churchill. Modern men and women may, however, instead leave extensive email records,which will be searchable by keyword, sender and date.

Efforts are being made to ensure that access to this material is not lost. Google, one of Andrew Keen’s big bad internet wolves, is at the forefront. In February, the company’s vice-president, Vint Cerf, warned at a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that we were facing a “digital dark age” as the software required to read digital storage devices—microfilm, floppy discs, CD-Roms, USB sticks—becomes obsolete. He is promoting a project to preserve examples of every piece of information software so that old formats can still be referred to even hundreds of years in the future. He has called the idea “Digital Vellum” after the soft calfskin parchment of medieval manuscripts.

Libraries and archives have been quick to respond to the transition from paper trails to email inboxes. In 2011, the poet Wendy Cope sold a cache of more than 40,000 emails, sent and received since 2004, to the British Library. Such digital resources may lack the romance of love letters scented with perfume, but they do offer hope that our age will not go unrecorded.

Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth, wrote an intriguing essay earlier this year explaining why she had never kept a diary. As a teenager she had concluded that “the writing of life will take longer than the living of it.”

She observes that her Yahoo! email account, “opened circa 1996 and still going”, is a more accurate record than any diary. “In there (though I would rather die than read it all over),” she writes, “is probably the closest thing to an honest account of my life, at least in writing . . . With all the kind deeds and dirty lies and domestic squabbles and bookish friendships and online fashion purchases . . . When I am dead, if my children want to know what I was like in the daily sense, not as a writer, not as a more-or-less presentable person, but simply the foolish human being behind it all, they’d be wise to look there.”