Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
5.2 What Others Think About Major Threats to Digital
Preservation
A major survey carried out by the PARSE.Insight project [
1
], with several thousand
responses from around the world, across disciplines and across stakeholders, has
shown that the majority of researchers thought that there were a number of threats
to the preservation of digital objects which were either very important or important.
There are a number of general threats as shown in Fig.
5.1
.
It is interesting to see that human error, natural disasters and political instability
are included in the list, in addition to concerns about funding and continuity.
There were also some more specific threats which are summarised in Table
5.1
.
These were regarded by a clear majority across disciplines, countries and roles as
either “important” or “very important”.
Fig. 5.1
General threats to digital preservation,
n
=
1,190
Table 5.1
Threats to digital preservation
Outline threat
Examples
Users may be unable to understand or use
the data e.g. the semantics, format,
processes or algorithms involved
Things which used to be tacit knowledge
are no longer known. For example
particular terminology may fall out of
use; whole languages may die; paradigms
of ways to analyse problems may
disappear
Non-maintainability of essential hardware,
software or support environment may
make the information inaccessible
Hardware on which one currently depends,
for example on Intel x86 CPUs, or tape
readers, or whole operating systems
which software relies, on may no longer
function through lack of support. Open
source software may be available but its
developers may drift away
