Page 68 - Building Digital Libraries

Preservation Planning

all the time. Consider Microsoft’s popular MS Word Document
format. This format is nearly ubiquitous in the document-
editing space, but Microsoft continually removes support for
older versions of the software. Currently, any files created prior
to 1997 would be unable to be opened in a current version of
MS Office. And files created in their older MS Works format
require significant conversion and would likely no longer ren-
der properly in the current software. Before Microsoft Word
was dominant, Corel’s Wordperfect format was used every-
where and before that, everyone used MicroPro’s WordStar.
Nowadays, most people who didn’t use computers in the 1980s
and 1990s haven’t even heard of these programs.
All disciplines contend with file obsolescence, and unread-
able files have no use. In libraries and other cultural heritage
organizations, PDF files have been favored for storing or cre-
ating document-based content. PDF is another format that is
notorious for making significant changes between file versions,
and PDF viewers continually drop support for reading older
PDF documents. Even the so-called archival PDFs—docu-
ments stored in PDF/A—have been shown to be much less
durable than originally conceived, since the PDF/A document
format has multiple versions which impact the ability of a PDF
reader to properly represent content stored in the container.
This approach assumes that so long as data is preserved
at a bit level, access to both the original content and experi-
ence can be re-created through software emulation. And this
is an approach being used today. At the iPres conference in
2016, Espenschied, Stobbe, Liebetraut, and Rechert presented
2
a paper on exhibiting historical digital artwork through emula-
tion. The paper detailed the researchers’ attempt to restore the
original digital experience of Olia Lialina’s net art piece, My
Boyfriend Came Back from the War. The presentation and paper
document the technical design and challenges related to using
emulation to achieve the result.
Copyright law and software licensing models limit the use
of emulation as a preservation strategy at the operating system,
application, and file levels. However, projects like the Software
Conservatory and large emulation and archiving projects like
those found with the Internet Archive or the Web Archiving
3
Project demonstrate that emulation likely will play a role in
4
the long-term preservation of content, but likely will not be the
primary mechanism for providing long-term access to cultural
heritage information. These solutions tend to be software- or
project-based, meaning that organizations counting on emula-
tion as a long-term solution will likely find that content will
remain inaccessible to users for the foreseeable future.

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