Once upon a time, records managers only needed to worry about a finite number of records formats, mostly paper and analog documents. That’s not true anymore. In today’s digital world, the number and variety of record types have exploded and continue to proliferate every day.
This creates entirely new risks in records management. What happens when that software is no longer actively developed or supported?
“Something like software preservation, even if we wanted to use it to process things, that is actually one of the biggest policy issues that makes organizations that do digital preservation the most wary,” Leslie Johnston, NARA’s director of digital preservation, told federal technology news site FCW.
That’s because software obsolescence can leave records in a state of limbo. You might not be able to open a digital record at all without the original software. Or, you might still have a way to open the record but not with all relevant contextual information.
The software doesn’t even have to go entirely obsolete. It just has to change enough over time that early file versions no longer work with current versions of the software. Johnston cites the word processor WordPerfect as an example: “Take, say, an early WordPerfect file from the 1990s. You might be able to open it in its original format using current WordPerfect — it still exists – or Microsoft Word. But you might not fully capture all of the content or the look and feel in that migration.”
What can you do about this situation?
Fundamentally, it’s a risk management exercise. Technological shifts create the risk that records themselves will become inaccessible and thus obsolete. Hardware can be an issue here too. Digital records can become trapped where they live, from the old floppy disks that have gone out of use to more modern USB drives or cloud servers. All of these run the risk of obsolescence themselves.
Preservation strategies:
- Use the original software. This is ideal but not always possible or practical. If nothing else, licensing agreements and copyright law could affect whether the original software, even if it still exists, is accessible by the organization.
- Migrate data forward. This approach – always updating records to the most current format – can ensure records themselves never go obsolete, but it can also be expensive, labor-intensive, and still run the risk of losing contextual metadata.
- Use a special viewer. Some files can be viewed through software that’s different from the software in which it was created, designed to view but not update or create the format.
- Turn to conversion software. In this case, you use a third-party software solution to convert the old record format into a new format. Unfortunately, data is likely to be lost following this option.
- Use an emulator. Here, an emulator simulates the original software, allowing access to the digital file without access to the original software. Again, however, contextual information and metadata is likely to be lost.
Unfortunately, protecting against obsolescence is not a simple or trivial concern. Organizations and government agencies need to evaluate where and how they create new records and assess the risks before choosing a specific strategy to mitigate the risk.
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