Conserving heritage in the digital age

Technology advances at lightning speed and while the industry may relish the developments that emerge, researchers are concerned about preserving access to digital material and protecting our cultural heritage. The KEEP ('Keeping emulation environments portable') project, fund...

Technology advances at lightning speed and while the industry may relish the developments that emerge, researchers are concerned about preserving access to digital material and protecting our cultural heritage. The KEEP ('Keeping emulation environments portable') project, funded under Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Theme of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) to the tune of EUR 3.15 million, aims to develop tools that will facilitate universal access to our increasingly digitised cultural heritage.

The project partners will develop an Emulation Access Platform to make possible the accurate rendering of objects such as text, sound and image files. With this system in place, the information can then be securely accessed for the long haul. The emulator, which can be described as a piece of software, will have the capacity to identify and 'play' or open older computer files including floppy disks and games.

According to the researchers, the KEEP emulator will differ from those currently on the market, because the latter are specific to certain platforms or media types and so the types of media format they can emulate are limited.

'They are all self-enclosed and can become obsolete just like the media they are emulating,' explained KEEP partner Mr Dan Pinchbeck, a computer games expert at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. 'KEEP changes all of that; it ensures that these emulators and their media will survive.'

The University of Portsmouth's Dr Janet Delve said people typically do not save files digitally, regardless of whether they are personal camera pictures or national archives. 'But every digital file risks being either lost by degrading or by the technology used to ''read'' it disappearing altogether,' the computer historian at the university's School of Creative Technologies noted.

'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.'

New digital information is being created all the time. Experts believe that the amount recorded in 2010 will be equivalent to 18 million times the information contained in all the books ever written, and this growth rate is unlikely to slow down.

Latest data show that the National Archive in the UK holds the equivalent of 580,000 encyclopaedias of information in file formats that are no longer on the market. For its part, the British Library has said that the problems in accessing and protecting old digital files burn a major hole in Europe's pocket; more than EUR 3 billion in business value is lost this way each year.

'We are facing a massive threat of the loss of digital information. It's a very real and worrying problem,' remarked computer historian Dr David Anderson, a member of the Centre for European and International Studies Research at the University of Portsmouth. 'Things that were created in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s are vanishing fast, and every year new technologies mean we face a greater risk of losing material.'

Despite museums currently housing early hardware such as computers and games consoles, visitors cannot get the full picture of how these machines actually worked because the software cannot be used, he said. 'It would be much the same as putting musical instruments on display but throwing away all the music,' Dr Anderson explained, adding, 'for future generations it would be a cultural catastrophe.'

The KEEP partners are also targeting the security of software and data that can be encoded to be read by newer, faster and better computers in the future.

Also participating in this project, which is being coordinated by the National Library of France, are Czech consulting firm Cross Czech A.S. the German National Library and the National Library of the Netherlands.