Expanded version of the article "Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents" that appeared in the January 1995 edition of Scientific American (Vol. 272, Number 1, pp. 42-7).
Publisher
Council on Library and Information Resources
Critical Arguements
CA "It is widely accepted that information technology is revolutionizing our concepts of documents and records in an upheaval at least as great as the introduction of printing, if not of writing itself. The current generation of digital records therefore has unique historical significance; yet our digital documents are far more fragile than paper. In fact, the record of the entire present period of history is in jeopardy. The content and historical value of many governmental, organizational, legal, financial, and technical records, scientific databases, and personal documents may be irretrievably lost to future generations if we do not take steps to preserve them."
Conclusions
RQ "We must develop evolving standards for encoding explanatory annotations to bootstrap the interpretation of digital documents that are saved in nonstandard forms. We must develop techniques for saving the bit streams of software-dependent documents and their associated systems and application software. We must ensure that the hardware environments necessary to run this software are described in sufficient detail to allow their future emulation. We must save these specifications as digital documents, encoded using the bootstrap standards developed for saving annotations so that they can be read without special software (lest we be recursively forced to emulate one system in order to learn how to emulate another). We must associate contextual information with our digital documents to provide provenance as well as explanatory annotations in a form that can be translated into successive standards so as to remain easily readable. Finally, we must ensure the systematic and continual migration of digital documents onto new media, preserving document and program bit streams verbatim, while translating their contextual information as necessary."
