Responding on points from a variety of people (apologies in advance for
the cut and pasting):
Steve Hitchcock wrote:
> > The critical point for repositories is to obtain the *source*
> > copy of the deposited item, exactly as the author created it.
I agree with Steve's point that preserving the original where possible
is a good policy. While much of digital preservation best practice is
still evolving, I think it is quite widely acknowledged that this is a
good idea. The Cedars Project (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars) suggested
this approach as a central pillar of preservation practice several years
ago now.
> Peter Crowther wrote:
> I'm not entirely sure I agree. File formats change - rapidly! - and
> some of the more obscure tools are not commonly installed. For a
simple
> example, consider a Microsoft Word document with embedded Microsoft
> Visio diagrams. There are comparatively few machines on which that
> document could be viewed intact, and there is comparatively little
> chance that repository software could satisfactorily transform the
> source document.
In some cases the original does indeed require unusual (if not obsolete)
software to render it. I'm afraid this is a little indicative of digital
preservation in general. One solution does not fit all. But in the case
of Peter's example, would we really be happy leaving the author to
migrate the Visio to another format. Would we be left with little more
than an access copy insufficient for preservation and future use/re-use
(eg. a JPEG), or would we get lucky and end up with something more
preservation worthy (eg. SVG or even WMF?) I don't think we should be
leaving this to chance.
From an OA point of view, I would encourage the archiving of the
original, with the efforts of the archive staff hopefully on hand to
deal with any preservation/access issues. In this case perhaps the
creation of an access copy of the Visio while retaining the original in
the archive as well. As preservation services develop (see the PRESERV
Project, http://preserv.eprints.org/), we will have automated alerts
warning of difficult to access material in our repositories. The support
of preservation action services to then address problem formats will
also hopefully be appearing soon (see the Planets Project,
http://www.planets-project.eu)
By forcing the creator to perform preservation actions (eg. migration to
PDF), some other well established preservation best practice is
instantly broken. Namely, to record the details of any changes made to
the subject of preservation (when, how, why).
As Steven Harnad of course notes, some feel the priority for OA is
populating repositories. This does not feel completely incompatible with
the thoughts of us preservation worriers! Ask authors for submission of
the original (ensuring the least burden is placed upon them) and allow
the repository managers to perform preservation actions as required
(ensuring the right preservation actions are made and recorded, and
making sure we still have the original should any later migrations turn
out to be ill advised).
Peter also wrote:
> For a more complex example, and admittedly not one to do with OA,
check
> out the preservation of the Domesday Project, where the source form of
> the data is now almost unreadable.
BBC Domesday is a bit of an extreme example in comparison to the
reasonably simple forms of documents we predominantly see in OA
repositories. However I would note that with BBC Domesday the data
formats were so complex, so great in number, and inadequately documented
that an emulation approach proved to be quite useful (in short, keep the
data in its original format, and emulate the hardware/software).
Henry Gladney wrote:
> I believe that the format of choice for office documents that will
become
> accepted is the ODF standard (currently the default format of
OpenOffice.)
> This is a particular set of XML schema.
>
> Bowing to pressure from some governments (State of Massachusetts and
at
> least one European government (Germany, I believe)), Microsoft Corp.
three
> months ago committed that in 2007, Microsoft Word would support this
> format.
That's not quite accurate. Microsoft is working to standardize its
Office XML formats. These will be the standard save formats from Office
2007 (termed "Office Open XML"). This is a different initiative to ODF.
While I'm sure preservation isn't the only motive in the move to XML (as
Henry hints at), Microsoft *is* interested in this area. The British
Library has been a key part of the standardization initiative (more
recently also joined by the Library of Congress). A quick quote from a
summary of Office Open XML reads:
"Perhaps the most profound issue is one of long-term preservation. We
have learned to create exponentially increasing amounts of information.
Yet we have been encoding that information using digital representations
that are so deeply coupled with the programs that created them that
after a decade or two, they routinely become extremely difficult to read
without significant loss. Preserving the financial and intellectual
investment in those documents (both existing and new) has become a
pressing priority."
http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/OpenXML%20White
%20Paper.pdf
Well described formats allow the implementation of preservation tools by
third parties. While this certainly isn't a magic bullet for
preservation it is a really significant step forward for a specific set
of formats (and one hopefully of interest to the list).
Paul Wheatley
--------
Digital Preservation Manager
eIS/Architecture
The British Library
01937 546254
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