Actually William Leisner made it up in his story "Gods, Fate, and Fractals" in the anthology
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds II. I then elaborated on it in my novel
DTI: Watching the Clock. However,
Timo's right -- the shielded records can't access information from alternate timelines. They're nothing more than what the name says. The DTI keeps records of events in its own timeline, and if that timeline is changed, the records are shielded against alteration, so the DTI agents in the altered timeline are able to discover that it's been altered (assuming the alteration takes place after the creation of the shielded records). They're just a protected archive of data from the "home" timeline. They aren't some crystal ball that gives the DTI knowledge of events in every timeline.
The loss of the
Enterprise-C took place decades before the shielded records came into use in the novel continuity, so it's not a timeline that the DTI would have any knowledge of, except through Sela's unverified testimony to Picard in "Redemption, Part II."