Information archaeology

While some information is old in minutes, there’s plenty of information in your organisation you need to keep for many years. Take action now, or older file formats could be unreadable.

By Mary Branscombe, 9 Jan 2009 at 15:41

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With your inbox always full to overflowing, you may not look back at older messages and documents very often – but that’s where most of the knowledge in your organisation is buried.

Search tools make it easier to find without digging away by hand, but what happens to the older files and the messages you have to delete to stay under your mail quota? It’s not just about the storage space – file formats change and older applications won’t always run on the latest version of Windows, even if you can find the software you were using 10 years ago.

It’s a major issue for governments, says Natalie Ceeney, the chief executive of the National Archives. “We're used to being able to walk into a business and read documents in Word. We expect our salary to be paid, we expect to get a pension. That means the government needs to keep pension records. We need to keep records on where we bury nuclear waste. We need to make sure censuses taken today are readable in a hundred years. But digital information is inherently more ephemeral than paper and we are living in a world with a ticking time bomb.”

The problem has already reached the oil and gas industry. Many of the ‘elephant’ oil fields discovered recently aren’t new, it’s just that the analysis and extraction techniques have improved to the point that it’s now economical to mine them. But if the survey is 20 years old, is it cheaper to rescue the data or do the survey all over again?

How about a company that closes a research lab and then needs to defend a patent developed by that lab, or restart old research using a new generation of technology. A pharmaceutical company that needs to play video footage from a 20-year-old clinical study has the same problem as a police force that needs to produce video evidence used for a conviction that’s appealed a decade later.

Adam Farquhar, head of digital library technology at the British Library, is part of the EU’s PLANETS projects (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) which calculates that losing access to documents loses businesses across Europe €3 billion (£2.7 billion) every year.

“Billions and billions of documents representing billions of Euros are at substantial risk,” he believes. “This affects everyone who keeps digital media for more than 15 years.”

Physical failure and formats

Failure of the media files are stored on is familiar. CDs often last fewer than 10 years, magnetic tape has to be spooled regularly to keep it readable, and older drives may no longer be available – and if you do have both the media and the drive, you need drivers for your current operating system and the right connector.

Assuming the files are available, the real issue is the file format. Microsoft Office includes converters for many older formats from Microsoft and other vendors, as does OpenOffice.org, but subtle formatting changes can cause problems – if a document is repaginated and a legal agreement refers to a clause on a specific page, for example.

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Information Software

Information archaeology & Software 12 Jan 2009 I found your article on the problems of maintaining documents very relevant. I recently had a computer failure. Despite maintaining many back-up copies of my many documents, it has taken me 5 months to get back to some form of working. Some of my records are now in serious trouble. Although I am into designing and manufacturing equipment, I don’t rely on that work for a living, if I did, I would now be out of business. The problem I have had is as you describe, in your article, the non compatibility of old software. I have been able, with the help of others and forums, to recover 10 years of e-mails. But my biggest remaining problem is with the hundreds of Drawings I have done over the years. These drawings are part of many manufacturing documents and other ongoing records. Having had to upgrade from Microsoft Windows 98 to Vista, I now find that I can no longer work with all those hundreds of important drawings. For long term computability, I thought, I had been using a very good, simple and quick drawing available within most Microsoft operating systems, namely “Microsoft Drawing 1.01”. I now find that Microsoft no longer support Microsoft and that all these old drawings are now in serious trouble, I need them to continue for 20 to 30 years. I have eventually been able to get various software working so that I can see and print these documents with the drawings in the MS Word and Excel documents, but I can’t edit or update them. I am going to have to redraw many of them, if I can find suitable, simple drawing software that can do that work and remain readable and editable for many years. The software industry needs to realise that we are on this planet and hopefully, will be around for many years to come. Our information and records Must be able to stay with us for hundreds or thousands of years, not just 5 or 6 years. What is going to happen to all our human knowledge when that asteroid does hit Earth ? We can still find and read old Egyptian and Mayan records, and many records in much of the ancient world, but what about all our records since computers came into being ? What if it takes 10 years to get electricity working again ? But the main point is that present day records should continue to be workable for 50 – 100 years, not dead within 5 years as is presently happening.

By Ip_HughLeytondcd on Tuesday Jan 13