Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
15.1.1.2 Environment Changes
These include changes to licences or copyright and changes to organisations, affect-
ing the usability of digital objects. External information, ranging from the DNS to
XML DTDs and Schema, vital to the use and understandability, may also become
unavailable.
15.1.1.3 Termination of the Archive
Without permanent funding, any archive will, at some time, end. It is therefore possi-
ble for the bits, i.e. the binary objects, to be lost, and much else besides, including the
knowledge of the curators about the information encoded in those bits. Experience
shows that much essential knowledge, such as the linkage between holdings, opera-
tion of specialised hardware and software and links of data files to events recorded
in system logs, is held by such curators (in their heads) but not written down or
encoded for exchange or preservation. Bearing these things in mind it is clear that
any repository must be prepared to hand over its holding - together with all these
tacit pieces of information - to its successor(s).
Other, major, threats include financial, political or environmental (such as floods
or earthquakes) upheaval.
15.1.1.4 Changes in What People Know
As described earlier the Knowledge Base of the Designated Community determines
the amount of Representation Information which must be available. This Knowledge
Base changes over time as terminology, tools and theories change.
15.1.2 What can be Relied on in the Long Term?
While we cannot provide rigorous proofs, it is worth, at this point, listing those
things which we might credibly argue would be available in the long term, in order
to clarify the basis of our approach. We should be able to trace back our preservation
plans to these assumptions. Were we able to undertake a rigorous mathematical
proof these would form the basis of the axioms for our “theorems”.
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Words on paper (or titanium sheets) that people can read; ISO standards kept in
national libraries are an example of this. Over the long term there may be an issue
of language and character shape.
Carvings in stone and topics have proven track records of preserving informa-
tion over hundreds of years.
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The information such as Representation Information which is collected.
A somewhat recursive assumption, however it is difficult to make progress
without it. This Representation Information includes both digital as well as
physical (e.g. topics) objects.
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Some kind of remote access
