National Diet Library Newsletter
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Survey report on long-term digital
preservation
and access published
| Digital Library Division, Projects Department, Kansai-kan of the National
Diet Library (NDL), published the results of its survey conducted in FY2004
as a report entitled "Survey on Methods for Ensuring Long-term Preservation
and Access of Digital Information" and made it available on the NDL website
(available in Japanese only).
Preserving digital information and rendering it depends entirely on the technical environment. Thus digital information is said to be very fragile compared to paper-based materials. For example, every time a new version of OS or a new medium of preservation comes into use, software which depends on the older versions or media becomes obsolete and unavailable. In order to find a resolution for this technological obsolescence and other problems, the NDL has conducted various surveys since FY2002. In FY2004, the third year, a survey was done on the sample CD-ROMs (Windows/MS-DOS-based) which had been received up to FY1999 and have been kept under storage by the NDL to see how they could be fit for migration or emulation.* *Migration is a method of overcoming technological obsolescence by transferring digital information resources from one hardware/software generation to the next. Emulation is another method of overcoming technological obsolescence by developing techniques for imitating obsolete systems on future generations of computer systems. As a result of the survey it was found that migration could be done without major problems. However, emulation was valid for only about 30% of all samples. Also for some CD-ROMs we could not, by the usual method, obtain the programs which are necessary to render the digital data contained in them. From this survey it has become obvious that emulation, which had been deemed to be suitable for long-term preservation of digital materials, lacks a comprehensive validity at this point. In this survey we tested only CD-ROMs. The NDL, however, also holds floppy disks, game machine cassettes, and so on. It is expected that keeping these kinds of materials permanently accessible would be much more difficult than CD-ROMs. Based on the result obtained so far, we will continue with the survey and examine more effective means to ensure long-term preservation of digital information. Ref:
For more information on the survey report, please contact:
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