Baked beans and digital preservation

 

It was a wet cold Sunday morning here in North East Victoria, so we had beans on toast for breakfast and listened to the radio.

We prefer Wattie's beans, a New Zealand brand, because they are not quite as sweet as some of the other common brands.

Wattie's beans are almost unique in that they still come in a non-ringpull can, meaning that if you don't have the required access technology, in this case a can opener, you can't get at the beans.

And this is the first part of digital preservation - you need access to the appropriate technology to read the media, either by knowing someone with the correct kit, getting hold of a suitable access device, such as a floppy drive, a CD drive or a suitable card reader.

And of course, you need how to use them.

Which is why events like the Cambridge Festival of Floppies are important. Old buggers like me who have worked with digital preservation and file format conversion almost all their working lives, are either retired or getting close to it - after all 3.5" floppies dropped out of use roughly twenty five years ago and computers stopped coming with CD drives sometime in the early 2010s. And we won't mention Apple and the weird variable speed floppy drives in pre OS X macs.

So, somehow, the message needs to be passed on, which is why technology workshops are valuable. I might remember about how to cable up a floppy disk controller and access the media, but I'm not going to be around for ever, as are these super convenient USB based floppy drives you can find on ebay

Some day they're going to stop selling them as there's no profit in them, and anyway, no one makes 3.5" drives any more, meaning most of the external USB 3.5" drives you can buy are made using recycled components. (5.25" and these weird 3" drives used by some Amstrad word processors in the nineties in the UK, are another problem entirely - recycled 5.25" and 3" drives in working condition are almost impossible to find.)

Once you've recovered the files there's also the problem of file format.

For more recent content it's not really a problem - the use by digital cameras of JPEG format, and the dominance of Microsoft's file formats and Adobe's pdf have created a monoculture - if you can read the device you can almost certainly access the content.

And if you can't, both Libre Office and AbiWord between them support a wide range of legacy formats.

But that's by no means the whole problem. What do we do with the content once we have recovered it and have assured ourselves we can read it?

This is actually a live problem, up at the Athenaeum we are increasingly receiving donations of people's family history research material on removable media - almost all on USB sticks, although we do have a few CD's and external hard disk drives.

As we are a volunteer organisation with fairly minimal external funding we have the whole problem of being able to preserve the data long term, at least the format monoculture means that we are able to read the scanned letters and look at the old photographs without difficulty.

So, we can read the data, look after the media, and try and find a long term storage solution. And, while the content may be digital, it's mostly derived from non digital sources.

The future, of course, will be different.

As we know, no writes letters any more, and everyone's photographs are saved to the cloud somewhere, which makes will make the whole business of family history and biography rather more difficult.

In fact, there was an article on the ABC's website this morning bewailing the death of the biography, exactly because no one writes diaries or letters and of course there is the question of what happens to our digital content when we die.

What this means is that there is no assurance of long term access to digital content as it increasingly moves to the cloud. 

For people working in the field of family history this increasingly means that all their material is stored in the cloud. Even if it was originally in a non digital format it will have been scanned, indexed and stored.

If someone does some oral history work the recordings will be digital, as will any transcriptions. I could go on, but you get the picture.

Creating a portfolio of your work and writing it to a USB stick and giving it to a memory institution such as the Athenaeum is not a solution - we don't have a long term preservation solution of our own, and if we found somewhere to lodge the work, that somewhere will of course be dependent on external funding for the foreseeable future, and as we have seen with the failure of projects like the Florence Nightingale digitisation project to deliver, even funding does not guarantee either access or continuity of access...