Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
5.1 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 Silicon Carbide sheets) that people can read; ISO standards
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
information over hundreds of years.
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The information such as some fundamental 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
Network access is the natural assumption but in principle other methods
of obtaining information from a given address/location would suffice, for
example fax or horse-back rider.
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Some kind of computers
Perhaps not strictly necessary but this seems a sensible assumption given the
amount of calculation needed to do some of the most trivial operations, such
as displaying anything beyond simple ASCII text, or extracting information
from large datasets.
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People? Organisations?
Clearly neither the originators of the digital objects nor the initial host organ-
isations can be relied on to continue to exist. However if no people and no
organisations exist at all then perhaps digital preservation becomes a moot
topic.
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Identifiers?
Some kind of identifier system is needed, as discussed in
Sect. 10.3.2
, will
be needed, but clearly we cannot assume that any given URL, for example,
will remain valid.
With these in mind we are almost ready to move on to some general considerations
about future-proofing digitally encoded information.
