Part Two: Losing the First
Draft of History
(see also: Part One: "Online
Sources for Images")
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Speaker: Vicky McCargar
Reported by Michael Jesse
Vicky McCargar, Senior Editor, Library Project Development, Los Angeles Times, had been in the news business more than 25 years when she decided to get her MLS and focus her career on news image archiving. And very quickly she zeroed in on a specialty -- the questionable long-term survival of electronic media.
Before joining the Editorial Library at The Times, VIcky served as graphics director, and helped develop an online archive for information graphics. Although her graphics archive was a huge success, she said she was surprised at how quickly some of the software used to support it became outdated. As she began to explore this issue she realized that our digital archiving systems are not nearly as secure as we may believe.
In her presentation at SLA, Vicky gave several examples of important electronic data collections that have been lost during the first decades of electronic storage. Even today's backups, RAID arrays and CD-burning programs are not a guarantee of long-terms survival.
News librarians were already aware of the debate over how long digitial media will survive. If you burn a collection of images on a CD today, will that CD still work in 10 or 20 years? But Vicky pointed out that this is only part of the problem. Even if the CD is still in working order in 20 years, will a PC manufactured then be able to read today's CDs? And if the CD contains images made with Photoshop 5, will the version of Photoshop in use 20 years from now be able to open it accurately? What if Adobe itself is no longer in business by then?
Migration vs. 'Emulation'
As her research progressed, Vicky soon discovered that not enough people in the news industry are asking these questions. Some presume that the periodic migration of data from an old CD to a new one is a sufficient solution, but Jeff Rothenberg of Rand Corp. demonstrated that migration can in fact just make things worse because it does not solve the problems of incompatable formats while at the same time it exposes the data to corruption errors during migration.
Rothenberg advocates "emulation," in which a modern PC is taught to behave like a much older one and to operate long-defunct software. Fortunately for electronic archivists, much progress on emulation has been made already by enthusiasts of 1980s-era video games. These games would be lost if not for emulation techniques which can also be employed by archivists of other materials.
For the news librarian this means archiving not just the electronic record of the photo, graphic or text document, but also archiving metadata describing the versions of software used to create those objects and the machines and operating systems on which those software systems functioned. Even information on the CD-burning software and the workstation used for burning should be recorded.
Vicky stressed that "it is not possible to preserve an electronic record. You can only preserve the ability to create a new version when you need to."
| Vicky McCargar is senior editor for library projects at the Los Angeles Times. An editor for 25 years, she has been managing the integration of production and archives workflows, including investigating data standards and user interface issues. She has a master's degree in science journalism from the University of Missouri and is currently completing an MLIS degree at UCLA, where she is studying digital preservation of newspaper content. |