Unfortunately (like the Asian example you provide) this approach stops being useful very quickly. Images are also very important, and cannot be easily transformed to a 'simple' format, although you could argue PNGs could be used. However, in the National Archives I currently work at (as a code monkey), a high importance is attached to the look and feel of the original, i.e. they want to preserve the original layout whenever they can.
This makes sense, because migration, especially for things like Word documents and databases has a terrible track record over a longer period of time; think 50 - 100 years here. Two or three migrations (and yes, even though using a simple ASCII format seems a solution now, people in 20 years will want something different) on and you've lost important information in the document.
One approach we're looking at right now is emulation (and we've got a first version going: http://dioscuri.sourceforge.net/), allowing old software (and documents) to be run on any platform in the future. Of course, this brings along new problems such as storage, updating the emulator, etc.
Correct. And given the timespan these organisations plan for (well, at least the National Archives here in the Netherlands which I work for does), virtualisation is not an option - sooner or later the platform you're using becomes obsolete, and so any virtualisation software you have stops working. Remember that virtualisation can only reproduce the platform you're running on.
That is why emulation is a possible solution. And that's what we're working on at the moment (shameless plug: http://dioscuri.sourceforge.net./ Currently we're using Java and the JVM as an intermediate virtual machine, but the idea is to in the future create an independent virtual layer (see "Key Features", http://dioscuri.sourceforge.net/dioscuri.html), which is the only thing that needs to be adjusted; the emulator should run forever!
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Unfortunately (like the Asian example you provide) this approach stops being useful very quickly. Images are also very important, and cannot be easily transformed to a 'simple' format, although you could argue PNGs could be used. However, in the National Archives I currently work at (as a code monkey), a high importance is attached to the look and feel of the original, i.e. they want to preserve the original layout whenever they can. This makes sense, because migration, especially for things like Word documents and databases has a terrible track record over a longer period of time; think 50 - 100 years here. Two or three migrations (and yes, even though using a simple ASCII format seems a solution now, people in 20 years will want something different) on and you've lost important information in the document. One approach we're looking at right now is emulation (and we've got a first version going: http://dioscuri.sourceforge.net/), allowing old software (and documents) to be run on any platform in the future. Of course, this brings along new problems such as storage, updating the emulator, etc.
Correct. And given the timespan these organisations plan for (well, at least the National Archives here in the Netherlands which I work for does), virtualisation is not an option - sooner or later the platform you're using becomes obsolete, and so any virtualisation software you have stops working. Remember that virtualisation can only reproduce the platform you're running on. That is why emulation is a possible solution. And that's what we're working on at the moment (shameless plug: http://dioscuri.sourceforge.net./ Currently we're using Java and the JVM as an intermediate virtual machine, but the idea is to in the future create an independent virtual layer (see "Key Features", http://dioscuri.sourceforge.net/dioscuri.html), which is the only thing that needs to be adjusted; the emulator should run forever!