I HAD THE pleasure of spending a week in Mexico City to par- ticipate in the annual meeting of the International Council on Archivesa hosted by its Latin
American branch, the Association of
Latin American Archivistsb (ALA). This
was a large and wide-ranging conference that stimulated many thoughts
and ideas that affected my view of the
digital archiving challenge. It is clear
there are many archival institutions pursuing the problem out of necessity. They
are receiving or collecting artifacts created or rendered in digital form. Many
of these items are static in the sense
they could be rendered and preserved
using older techniques such as print or
even microfilm. There is a concept of
variable fidelity in which some aspect
of the digital artifact is imperfectly captured. For example, a text file might be
retained in readable but not editable
form. This does not work well with objects such as spreadsheets whose value
is in the interactive use of the computations captured in the spreadsheet. But
one might be willing to give up some
resolution if it meant the difference between capturing a portion of versus all
of a collection of digital images.
The independent operation of ar-
chives may not produce the kind of
mutual reinforcement that would arise
from inventing and adopting standards
for representation and transmission of
content, metadata, and other informa-
tion establishing the origins and his-
tory of the artifact. If such standards
could be developed and implemented,
it might make it possible for one archive
to ingest the content of another, should
circumstances demand it. Moreover,
a https://www.ica.org/en
b http://bit.ly/2i4myzg
such standards would make it possible
for one archive to reference the con-
tent of another—making it possible to
achieve a kind of global discovery of rel-
evant content. Some readers of this col-
umn will know there are already a num-
ber of standards in place, one of the
most important of which is the Open
Archival Information System reference
modelc (OAIS). This is a significant spec-
ification of the desirable functionality
of any archive and has the potential to
establish interoperability among ar-
chives. This property, interoperability,
will require that the standards for trans-
mission of digital archival information
include descriptors of format and se-
mantics of the nature and structure of
the information, its metadata and prov-
enance, intellectual property consid-
erations among other things. Another
powerful example is the Digital Object
Architectured developed by the Corpo-
ration for National Research Initiatives.
Some readers may wonder whether
the World Wide Web is already an example of an archive. It is not because
there is no assurance of long-lasting
storage or accessibility of the content.
To be sure, the WWW content is a candidate for archiving and the Internet Archivee is attempting to do exactly that.
A significant test of any specification
is that multiple, independent implementations can be shown to interwork.
That is, information from one archive
can be successfully accessed and transferred to another archive without losing
critical archival information. Establishing such standards and allowing archives to be networked could create an
ecosystem with substantial resilience.
c http://bit.ly/2zSkXb6
d http://bit.ly/2ArYa5c
e https://archive.org/
Multiple instances of content could be
found in distinct archives. The impact
of institutional failure of an archive
(For example, lack of funding, physical
destruction) could be mitigated by stor-
ing information in multiple locations;
an instantiation of the LOCKSS (lots of
copies keeps stuff safe) principle.
During this meeting it also became
apparent that archivists of digital content will need to be prescriptive about
the structure and encoding of digital artifacts they can process into the archive
successfully. A proactive stance could
improve the likelihood that digital content can be acquired and preserved.
Again, standards can help and the software industry can assist by working toward the creation of applications that
produce archive-ready content. Since
some digital artifacts require software
to be used or rendered, it stands to reason that software itself must also be
archived and executable over the long
term. That includes applications and
operating systems and perhaps, detailed
functional descriptions of hardware to
the extent that the instruction set of the
computer can be emulated at need.
It should be clear by now that archives will have to have privileges to
acquire and execute applications and
the necessary operating system(s) so
that acquired artifacts can live for long
time periods. Moreover, a long-lived
archive must rely on a business model
that matches the desired longevity that
might extend 100 years or more. Think
of archives housing 1,000-year-old vellum codices, for example. In addition
to the extensible standardization of
digital representation, then, we will
need legal and financial frameworks
that assist long-term preservation. We
must pursue these objectives lest our
digital history be lost in a mist of uninterpretable bits.
Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist
at Google. He served as ACM president from 2012–2014.
Copyright held by author.
The Role of Archives
in Digital Preservation
DOI: 10.1145/3169085 Vinton G. Cerf