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Preservation of Digital Information

Recently there was an Ask Slashdot about the the problem of preserving digital material. The basic idea was that we are creating a massive wealth of digital information, but have no clear plan for preserving it. What happens to all of those poems I write when I try to access them for my grandkids? What about the pictures of my kids I took with that digital camera? Can I still get to them in time to embarrass them in the future?

Obsolescence of digital media can happen in three different ways:

• Media Decay: Even when magnetic media are kept in dry conditions, away from sunlight and pollution, and hardly ever accesses they will still decay. Electrons will wander over the substrate of the media, causing digital information to become lost. CD-ROMs luckily do not have this same problem with electron loss. They still are sensitive to sunlight and pollution though. Many people mentioned last week that distributors of blank CD media often make claims of an hundred years or more for the duration of their products. Research seems to indicate the truth is closer to 25 years,which seems like a long time, until you consider the factors below. Besides, information professionals often think in terms of centuries rather than decades.
• Hardware obsolescence: Far more dangerous than the degradation of the actual information container is the loss of machines that can read it. For instance, the Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research received a bunch of data on old punch cards. The problem was they had no punch card reader. It took a decent chunk of time, and a good deal of money to eventually be able to read the data off of these cards, even requiring some old technicians to come out of retirement to help tweak the system. Hardware extinction is hardly a foreign topic to Slashdotters. It happens, and as technology increases its pace of change, it will happen more quickly.
• Software obsolescence: The real stone in the shoe of digital preservation is obsolescence of the software needed to open the digital document. This can include drivers, OSS, or plain old application software. We all have piles of old software that were written for older systems, or come across an old file the bottom of a drawer where we can't even remember what application it used.

There are several strategies for preserving digital information. People mentioned some last week:

• Transmogrification: printing the digital document into an analog form and preserving the analog copy. An example would be printing out a Web page and archiving the print of that Web page. This, obviously, takes out the main strength of a Web document, hyperactivity, and may also ignore important color and graphical content. An alternative form of this is the creation of hardcopy binary that could later be data entered into the computers of the future. The media suggested have ranged from acid free paper to stainless steel disks etched with the binary code. The two major problems with this idea are that any misrepresentation of the binary could have disastrous results for the renewal of the document, and transformation to hard copy limits the functionality of many types of digital documents to the point of uselessness.
• Hardware museums: preserving the necessary technology needed to run the outdated software. There are several weaknesses to this plan. Even hardware that is carefully maintained breaks and becomes un-usable. In addition, there is no clear established agency that will be responsible for maintaining these machines. Spare parts eventually become impossible to find and legacy skills are required for maintenance. There must be technicians with the requisite skills to service these preserved machines. Finally, it does not create efficient use if all possible future users must bottleneck to just a handful of viewing sites to have access to the information.
• Standards: reliance on industry-wide standardization of formats to prevent obsolescence. Market place pressures for software produces create an incentive for a company to differentiate their product from their competitors. While unrealistic in a capitalistic marketplace, standards such as SGML have proven successful for large scale digital document repositories, like the Making of America archive hosted by the University of Michigan. However, many of these large repositories also receive information from donors that is not in a standardized format, and do not feel comfortable turning away those documents.
• Refreshing: moving a digital object from one medium to another. For instance, transferring information on a floppy disk to a CD-ROM. This definitely seemed to be the preferred method of most Slashdotters. While this takes care of degradation and obsolescence of the media, it does not solve the problem of software obsolescence. A perfectly readable copy of a digital document is useless if there is not software program available to translate it into human-readable form.
• Migration: moving the digital document into newer formats. An example might be taking a Word 95 document and saving it as a Word 97 document. Single generation leaps are usually not a problem, so large volumes of information could be saved. Unfortunately, migrations over several generations are often impossible, as is migrating from a document type that was abandoned, and did not evolve. Also, information loss is common in migration, and may cause the document to become unreadable. While this may be the best single method available, it is very labor intensive, and some knowledge of the nature of documents would be essential to determining which information containers to migrate. For instance, often you lose aspects of a document (good and bad) when you migrate it, but which of those aspects are important?
• Emulation: creating a program that will fake the original behavior of the environment in which the digital object resided. This is another very intriguing method that could be used. It's actually already pretty common. For instance, most processor chips include emulators for lower level processors. There also aleady exists on the Internet a very active group of people who are interested in emulating old computer platforms. Still, we need to do a lot of research yet on the cost of this method, and what sorts of metadata are necessary to bundle with the digital object to facilitate its eventual emulation. Another problem is the intellectual property hassle caused by emulation. Reverse engineering is a big no no, and there is no point in making the lawyers rich. This area is actually where Open Source can be of biggest help to preserving the longevity of different kinds of applications.

Many people in the discussion last week seemed to believe that simple refreshment or migration of the data would be a sufficient answer to the problem. At a personal level that may be true, but for anyone responsible for large amounts of digital information, neither is a completely convincing method. Here are a couple of reasons why:

• Not all documents are the same- In the digital preservation literature, most people talk as if all digital information is in ASCII format. Au contraire. As computing becomes increasingly robust, so do the documents we create. Multimedia games, three dimensional engineering models, recorded speeches, linked spreadsheets, virtual museum exhibits and a host of other documents spurred by the development of the Web have cropped up. How are they going to be affected by migration to a new environment?
• It's so darned expensive- It's a little gauche to talk about, but the Y2K bug caused what ended up being a huge migration of digital information. How much did the US alone spend on that fiasco? $8 billion? For smaller organization who do not prepare for the preservation of their digital information, the cost of emergency migrations could cause all sorts of budget trouble.

There is some belief that there is no reason to preserve information at all. Most of what is created is just tripe anyway, and we should be more focused on creating content than preserving it. There are two reasons why some sort of preservation is important. First of all, it is inefficient to recreate information that already exists. Human energy is better spent on building upon existing knowledge to create new wisdom. How much do we already spin our wheels as several people collect the same data? What more could we be doing if we spent the energy instead on new pursuits? Secondly, there is some data that is irreplacable.

Which is not to say that we should keep everything. In a traditional archive, only 1% of documents received are kept. Ninety nine out of one hundred documents are destroyed for various reasons. A similar ratio is not unreasonable for digital documents. Consider that 16 billion email messages are sent each day. It seems ridiculous to keep all of them, but how do we weed out the ones we do want to keep? Appraisal of digital documents for archival purposes is going to become a major issue in the not distant future. There are already examples of data that have been lost, or nearly lost. NASA lost a ton of data off of decayed tapes. The U.S. Census nearly lost the majority of the data from the 1960 census. These huge datasets are important for establishing a scientific record that reveals longitudinal effects.

Increasingly, the record of the human experience is kept in a digital format. The act of preserving that information is the act of creating the future's past, the literal reshaping of our world in the eyes of the future. Nobody knows the best answer yet. There is probably not a single answer that will fit absolutely all situations. Information professionals are just beginning to do research in the form of user testing, cost-benefit analysis and modeling to answer some of the thornier issues raised by the preservation of digital information. There are things out there worth saving, we just need to figure out the best way to do it.

Some links of interest in case you would like to read more:

• a really good bibliography of related sources by Michael Day
• an article by Jeffrey Rothenberg outlining some of the issues
• a site at Leeds University with many related links