The following is a guest post by Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist, NDIIPP.
I’m excited to launch a new series, Insights, for The Signal. Insights will feature interviews and conversations between National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation working group members and individuals working on projects related to preservation, access and stewardship of digital information. We are thrilled to kick off this series with an interview I conducted with eminent computer scientist and engineer David Rosenthal.
Q: What do you think are one or two of the toughest problems we have already solved in digital stewardship? Further, what do you see as the most important aspects of those solutions?
A: I’m an engineer. Engineers never really get to completely solve a problem the way mathematicians do. There are never enough resources; engineers are trained to look for high-leverage opportunities. We work on something until it is good enough that improving it further isn’t the best use of resources right now. Maybe after we improve the thing that is the new best use of resources for a while, the first thing will become the next best use of resources again, so we go back to it.
Much of the resources of digital preservation have been devoted to preparing for formats to go obsolete and require migration. I’ve been arguing for a long time that this isn’t a good use of resources. Before the web, formats used to go obsolete quickly, but since the advent of the web in 1995, it is very hard to find any widely used format that has gone obsolete. The techniques we have had for a long time, such as open source renderers and emulation, work well enough to cope with format obsolescence if and when it eventually happens; further work in this low-leverage area is a waste of resources.
The most important aspect of the way that format obsolescence became not worth working on is that digital preservation had nothing to do with it. Formats stopped going obsolete for very fundamental reasons, not because digital preservation prevented it. Virtual machines and open source became part of mainstream IT for reasons that had nothing to do with preservation.
Q: Do you think there are lessons from those solutions that we should be applying to solve current pressing problems?
A: We need to look for high-leverage areas and devote our limited resources to them.