Page 69 - Building Digital Libraries

CHAPTER 4

As useful as it is, emulation is not a silver bullet. Aside from
requiring people to know how to use the emulated environ-
ment, emulation presumes that the resources are self-contained.
The growing number of dynamic, distributed, and cloud-based
resources present challenges that cannot be readily met simply
by emulating servers and software.
Format Migration
Format migration requires preservation to be an action verb,
not a passive operation. Within archives and museums, this ties
closely to the idea of curation. Just as physical artifacts require
long-term curation, repair, and so on, digital assets need to
be regularly treated to ensure that materials remain available
and accessible. Considering the doodle example above, format
migration would take a very different approach to emulation.
Rather than attempting to emulate the environments used to
create the original doodle, format migration converts the digi-
tal content away from the deprecated digital container format
to a supported one. And like the Microsoft Word example, this
happens all the time. When a user opens a file in the older MS
Word binary document format, the software often will prompt
users with newer software to upgrade to the newer file format.
By following the file format upgrade path, content can gener-
ally be placed into a new file format that preserves the original
format and user experience.
This approach comes at the cost of compatibility, since
files migrated to new formats may not be accessible by users
with older software or older systems. This is often the case in
the Microsoft MS Word document example. In fact, in 2013,
when Microsoft first introduced its “open” document format,
all software older than 2013 was unable to view or edit the new
file format. This created significant incompatibilities between
document formats, and caused several problems within the
MS Office ecosystem due to the large number of users working
with older versions of the Office Software Suite. These issues
required Microsoft to go back and upgrade all versions of MS
Office back to 2010 in order to enable support for the new MS
Office document formats. But this kind of document conver-
sion underlines the real concerns for organizations related to
file migration. Organizations must weigh not only the technical
merits of a file format or container, but also the availability of
software and systems that can utilize a format. Again, if preser-
vation is tied to access (and we believe that it is), then migrating
content to the very best preservation format doesn’t necessarily
promote long-term preservation, if that format isn’t accessible
save for a very niche set of hardware or software.

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