The art of digital preservation

Experts in capturing and preserving precious digital material - anything from science to art - for future generations are stepping up their efforts to stem the loss of material through constantly evolving technologies.

Digital Preservationists Dr David Anderson and Dr Janet Delve of the University of Portsmouth, are leading a project to preserve the complex digital age, including helping save digital art from oblivion.

Their project partners are the British Library, University of Glasgow, King’s College, London and French technology company Joguin sas. Together they have won £185,000 funding to hold three symposia at which world leaders in the preservation of complex digital materials will share and extend their knowledge.

Dr Anderson, co-principle investigator, said: “Significant progress has been made already in capturing and saving complex materials and environments but there are considerable challenges ahead of us. For example, interactive digital art works, 3D visualisations and videogames are highly complex digital objects which are not capable of being faithfully preserved over the long term using traditional techniques.

“The threat is very real that unless we do something, we’ll have a ‘lost generation’ in terms of our cultural heritage. Past generations captured who they were and what they did via museums and books, but the pace of technological development in the digital age has outstripped our capacity for preservation.

“Digital preservation is desperately important. In technology little things change all the time. Over the course of a 20 or 30 year working life the software we use is updated or made obsolete all the time but most of us aren’t really bothered by the changes. But in terms of science and art, digital preservation is increasingly important. Scientists in 100 years will need the records made today to further their understanding just as today’s scientists study what went before in terms of their research.

“In digital art, the key is to find ways of preserving the colour and visual aspects of a piece of art. If we don’t preserve the digital art made today, it could be like walking into a world famous gallery and seeing nothing on the walls, that no art has survived some global meltdown.”

The POCOS (Preservation of Complex Objects Symposia) project will hold symposia across the United Kingdom at which key leaders in the three fields will present their knowledge and share findings in a bid to collectively identify unsolved problems and map out the future research agenda for preserving the digital age. The symposia will be broadcast on YouTube and free books collecting the current research will also be produced in a bid to extend knowledge of the field.

The first symposium, on ‘Simulations and Visualisations’ will be held at King’s College, London on June 16-17. The second, on ‘Software Based Art’, will be held in Glasgow this autumn and the third, on ‘Gaming Environments and Virtual Worlds’, will take place in Cardiff early in 2012.

The University of Portsmouth’s Future Proof Computing Group is also partners in a Europe-wide project which won €4.02m to develop and build an emulator to ‘rescue’ digital files from a black hole. The project - KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable) aims to facilitate universal access to our cultural heritage by developing flexible tools for accessing and storing a wide range of digital objects.

Now in its third year the project has delivered a series of important results including a novel emulation service, and a database that describes, for the first time, the technical environment of a wide range of digital objects such as computer games or multimedia encyclopaedias. Work is almost complete on the highly portable KEEP virtual machine which will offer for the first time the prospect of being able to make our digital heritage available for future generations.

Dr Delve said at the time of that grant win: “People don’t think twice about saving files digitally - from snapshots taken on a camera phone to national or regional archives. But every digital file risks being either lost by degrading or by the technology used to ‘read’ it disappearing altogether. Former generations have left a rich supply of books, letters and documents which tell us who they were, how they lived and what they discovered. There’s a very real risk that we could bequeath a blank spot in history.”

Every year a vast amount of new digital information is created - it has been estimated that in 2010 this was equivalent to 18 million times the information contained in all the books ever written - and the rate of growth shows no sign of slowing. Britain’s National Archive holds the equivalent of 580,000 encyclopaedias of information in file formats that are no longer commercially available; research by the British Library suggests Europe loses £2.7bn each year in business value because of difficulties in preserving and accessing old digital files.

Researchers - and those in charge of national archives globally - have long been concerned about the threat of losing digital information.

Huge amounts of money have been spent trying to convert thousands of pieces of information into newer digital formats every time the old ones are made defunct or the fabric itself corrupts and degrades. The normal method of doing this is to 'migrate' obsolete media to new formats, but every migration carries the risk of corruption and degradation. Emulation recreates the platform used to run the media, so migration is not required and these risks are reduced.