The Bureau of Meteorology is transferring mind-boggling amounts of historical weather data to an online database.

The department estimates the data entry task – which includes decades of daily and hourly data from weather stations across the country - is worth about 1,000 years of public servants’ time.

BoM is considering outsourcing the work.

Insiders say management is in the market for a group that could crowdsource the digitisation of the Australian Historical Climate Record.

The project could see unpaid volunteers sign up to upload data, including hard-copy records from the 1800s from the National Archives of Australia.

“Crowdsourcing has the potential to advance this work much more quickly at lower cost,” a spokesperson told Fairfax reporters this week.

“[But] that decision will be dependent on whether funding can be secured, in addition to the market demonstrating capacity to deliver benefit and value for money,” she said.

Australia has daily records dating back to 1910, but it is useless for future predictions and modelling if it is not converted to a digital form.

“Paper records also exist in various forms that are not currently within the bureau's holdings, such as documentary records from various sources that have not been managed by the bureau,” BoM says.

The National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) has a similarly daunting task ahead of it in the digitisation of its records.

The archive has warned that thousands of hours of magnetic tape footage and audio could be lost if it is not preserved soon.