Paul Gerhardt, project director of the Creative Archive Licence Group, added the big news stories of the last three decades were "the punctuation marks in the stories of our lives".

BBC: NEWS | Entertainment | BBC News opens archives to public

"When you walk in, you are overcome by the smell of decay, and by awe at the sight of these staggeringly high piles of paper, " said Kate Doyle, of the National Security Archive, an American campaign group that specialises in tracing documents.

BBC: NEWS | Americas | Guatemala secret files uncovered

Meantime, the city archive of Amsterdam, Holland, has acquired a group of some 3oo photographs discovered last year during the renovation of a private Amsterdam home.

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With a storage system that intelligently organizes, archive and retrieves all this data, the project group was able to conduct analysis in half the time compared to its previous system.

FORBES: To Manage Big Data, You Need Smarter Storage