Raiders of the lost archive

Back in 1995, Rand Corporation computer scientist Jeff Rothenberg noted a disheartening fact about digital objects: the things that make them difficult to preserve are precisely those aspects that make them interesting and attractive in the first place.

The UK's National Archives (NA) is in the process of finding out how true that statement is. The organisation estimates that it has 580TB of data in formats that are no longer commercially supported. To remedy the situation, it announced this week that it has called in Microsoft to fix some of the problems that the company's fast evolving Office and Windows platforms have caused — problems that anyone along for the ride will know far too well.

The way this is being fixed is through Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007, which allows any previous versions of Windows and Office to be used side-by-side on a single PC. This emulation approach is one that Rothenberg would approve of. Rather than translating data into a new format — which could be compared to translating a poem into a different language, and then destroying the original — the document is retained in its original form.
 
NA has hinted that it may look to convert some of its archived information into open file formats. We hope that this doesn't mean Microsoft's Open XML system, which is far from the most open option. We also hope that, if conversion does take place, both the old and the new remain available: there are good reasons for both and no reason to deny either.

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The NA is facing a very tough challenge. The British Library, an organisation facing many of the same challenges as the NA, has admitted that the only thing organisations really know about digital preservation at the moment is how little they know. But, despite that uncertainty, the library claims openness is fundamental to the process — something that the NA, Microsoft and every other organisation facing a similar challenge will hopefully take record of.  At every stage in the decision-making process, one question must be uppermost:  in 500 years, how will our custodianship look? An open question — and an open answer.