Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
be obtained, digitised and incorporated into the AIP. Alternatively bibliographic
records which include the British Library as a location can be obtained and incorpo-
rated into the AIP as a reference. This is a satisfactory approach as there is a high to
degree of confidence in the permanence of the holdings and the user communities'
ability to access them.
14.6.2 Strategies in Response to an Identified Information
Preservation Risk
Information objects must be inspected on a case by case for their individual preser-
vation risk based on dependencies which will be affected by the passage of time.
Different strategies which effectively obviate these risks should be developed and
evaluated.
If we take another example from the MST data archives where an information
object, the GNU plot software analysis programs is deemed to be at risk. This soft-
ware extracts parameters and plots Cartesian product of wind profiles from NetCDF
data files.
Preservation risks have arisen due to the following user skill requirements and
technical dependencies.
The software requires a UNIX or Linux distribution the user community may lose
access to or the ability to operate these systems.
A future user may lose the ability to install different libraries and essential soft-
ware packages python, the with python-dev module, numpy array package or
pycdf
GNU plot may no longer be installed
The community may lose the technical ability to set environmental variables or
run required python scripts through a UNIX command line
The GNU plot template file to format plot output may no longer be accessible.
A number of preservation strategies now present themselves,
One solution is preserving the software through emulation, using for example
Dioscuri [ 178 ] which should be capable of running operating systems such as Linux
Ubuntu, which should satisfy platform dependencies. With the capture of specified
software packages/libraries and the provision of all necessary user instructions this
is a potentially a viable strategy for these stand-alone applications.
It is additionally possible to convert NetCDF files to another compatible format
such as NASA AMES [ 179 ]. The conversion can be achieved using commu-
nity developed software and the scripting language Python. This is a compatible
“self describing” ASCII format, information would still be accessible and easily
understood as long as ASCII encoded text can still be read (and assuming the
Representation Information is available). There would however be some reluctance
to do this now as NASA AMES files are not as easily manipulated making it more
cumbersome to analyse data in the desired manner.
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