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PASIG 2017: Ageing of Digital – Towards Managed Services for Digital Continuity

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PASIG 2017 (Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group) was hosted in Oxford this year at the Natural History Museum by Bodleian Libraries & Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge (DPOC). I attended on all three days (11th -13th September), when I wasn’t working I had the opportunity to listen to some thought provoking talks centered around the issue of digital preservation.

One of the highlights of the conference for me, was a talk given by Natasa Milic-Frayling, the founder of Intact Digital. The presentation entitled  ‘Ageing of Digital: Towards Managed Services for Digital Continuity’ demonstrated the innovative ways in which digital preservation issues are being approached.

Digital technology has a short lifespan; hardware and software become redundant and obsolete in a very short time, essentially outdated. This is  known as ‘Legacy Software’, outdated software that no longer receives vendor support or updates.

This poses the problem – How can we manage the life-cycle of digital in the face of a dynamic and changing computing ecosystem?                                        

Technologies are routinely changed, updated (sometimes at a cost), made redundant and retired. The value of digital assets needs to be protected. In the current climate there is an imbalance of power between the technology producers and providers and the content producers, owners and curators. The providers and producers can move on without the opinion or input of those who use the software.

How do we enable prolonged use of software to protect value of digital assets?

A case study was presented that contextualised the problem and the solution. The vendor Tamal vista Insights provided Cut&Search, a software for automated and semi automated  indexing of digitised manuscripts and digital artefacts that standard OCR can not handle.
The software was supplied to Fo Guang Shan, an International Chinese Buddhist Monastic Order with over 200 branch temples worldwide for use with their digitised manuscript collection. This project is made up of thousands of volunteers and spans years, beyond the providers expected life-cycle for their product, its primary market life-time.
 Intact Digital provide a managed service that allows for digital continuity. There are several steps in the process which then provide a  number of options to software providers and the content producers:
  • Deposit
  • Hosting
  • Remote Access
  • Digital Continuity Assurance Plans

The software can be hosted in a virtual machine and accessed remotely via a browser. The implications of this are far reaching for projects like the ones undertaken by the Fo Guang Shan. They don’t need to worry about the Cut&Search software becoming redundant and their digital assets remain protected. For smaller organisations operating on ever decreasing budgets this is an important step both for asset protection and digital preservation.

Key areas to develop

Although this is an important step, there is still much work to do and some key areas that need to be developed were highlighted. This will result in a sustained use of digital.

  • Economy around “retired” software
  • Legal frameworks and sustainable business models
  • New practices to create demand
  • New services to make it efficient, economical and sustainable

Changes to the Ecosystem

In taking these steps and creating a dialogue between the technology producers/providers and the content producers it changes the dynamic of the ecosystem, readdressing the imbalance in control.

 

The talk ended with two very pertinent statements;

“Together we can create new practices and
new models of extending the life of digital”
“Without digital continuity our digital content,
information and knowledge has no future”
As a trainee I still have lots to learn but a major theme running throughout digital archiving and digital preservation is the need for communication, collaboration and dialogue. Working together, sharing ideas and the challenges is key to securing the future of digital content.

 

A complete collection of the slides relating to this topic can be found here;  https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5415040.v1  Milic-Frayling, Natasa (2017): Aging of digital: Towards managed services for digital continuity. figshare.