What we lost in 2002

Every archive has a hole in it, and ours is the summer of 2002.

I was not here, so I am working from what I have been told at induction and from what is in the server notes. On 30 July 2002 the array that held our working masters failed, and took a large part of the Greyline digitisation output with it. Greyline was the internal name for the Borough contract of 1997–99 — forty-one boxes, something like seventy-eight thousand images.

What I find hard to square is this. There is a document in the file dated February 1999 that already describes the Greyline set as short. If the loss happened in 2002, what was the 1999 document describing? I have asked and been told it was a manifest error. I would like to see the corrected manifest, and I have not yet found one.

Probably I am misreading a filing quirk. But it has bothered me for a year.