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Transcript of the talk given by Richard Jones, Vice-President of Research and Development, Computer Power Software Group, at the 2nd National Preservation Office Conference: Multimedia Preservation - Capturing the Rainbow, in Brisbane, 28-30 November 1995.

In this talk, I'd like to select some of the key conference issues that Jan Lyall introduced at the start of the conference, all those days ago. This process is going to be very selective and relatively idiosyncratic. I've reorganised and paraphrased the themes slightly but with a bit of luck you may still recognise them for what they are. My talk will also reflect the parts about which I don't know least, if you see what I mean.

So let's just dive in and start with one of the first issues:

  • What key multimedia products are being produced?
  • Are collecting organisations coping?
  • Who has responsibility for deciding what to preserve?
  • The relationship between preservation and access
  • Equitable access to new forms of cultural heritage
  • How can we improve access?
  • Who has a role to play?
  • Further research
  • Adequate legislation
  • Conclusions

What key multimedia products are being produced?

What we're really talking about at present are usually electronic documents; there are in fact very few truly interactive products around. These are documents for 'browsing around' in which, in some sense, the information is slightly 'brain dead' because it doesn't interact with you and change itself after you've looked at it. That does mean that we are pretty much at the beginning of things in the brave new electronic world.

I was interested in a slide that Maggie Exon put up in her very thoughtful paper which described her 'categorisation element'. If we are going to look at, not only preservation priorities but also preservation needs, we really do need to look at those sorts of categorisation elements to be able to determine how best to hold and to preserve information.

Are collecting organisations coping?

I'm fundamentally an optimist. I believe that we're at a geological fault line and what happened in the near past may not have a lot of relevance to what is going to happen in the near future. Therefore, I believe that the new strata will become apparent, because if you look at any other technology it eventually settles down to a point where there is significant investment in the current technology and change becomes more difficult. Take a keyboard. We all know it is not optimal and there are better ways of doing it, but we can't afford to get there. I also believe that current formats are inherently going to be more stable than the formats which we had 15 years ago.

We obviously can't wait for all of those sorts of things to happen. We're going to have to be saying to lots of authors, 'Hey, I'm sorry, but what you're doing is the electronic equivalent of ice carving and we really can't retain that information, not unless we get a large series of refrigerators. We can't keep that information forever in its native form and, therefore, we'll have to find some other mechanism, like video representations of interactions, et cetera, to go on with'. I think, therefore, we're going to see (to use the geological analogy) some extinctions of technologies. I certainly don't think we're going to see extinctions of librarians, or archivists for that matter. I'm sure it gives you lots of hope and confidence!

Who has responsibility for deciding what to preserve?

There are lots of advantages in having information in digital and electronic form and I think that we should be able to start to produce tools to provide some automatic decision support with defined criteria to start to say in a more orderly fashion, 'Should we keep this or should we throw it away?'

What form do we want to preserve? Michael Lesk's point was that the logical representation is perhaps one of the key components that we want preserved. I agree: in many instances you can change the font at will and so from a 'look and feel' point of view, these aspects are a user's decision. Therefore, the important thing is to retain the logical representation.

The relationship between preservation and access

Nancy Elkington mentioned a couple of days ago that she fears the growing gulf between the two. I think that the new 'Commerce' Web servers that are coming on to the marketplace are going to provide both an opportunity and a challenge to people to actually determine the servers' relevant capabilities. They can certainly offer much better access control including logging information.

From listening to discussions about the issues of legal deposit, et cetera and the benefits of the new media, I feel we should be able to be more creative in our approach to legal deposit.

Equitable access to new forms of cultural heritage

It's a great phrase, isn't it? There is great opportunity for access to become more equitable; we should not necessarily be subject to the tyranny of distance. However, access may not be free; in a sense, it's not free now. If you are living in Alice Springs, catching a cab to the National Library is quite expensive. I think that we can do a lot to improve access.

How can we improve access?

I think we can and must use the strengths that the new technologies can offer us. We could build alerting systems quite readily to respond to an interest in a particular type of information. If something relevant were acquired by a collecting agency, it could then automatically say, 'Hey, something really exciting about the French Revolution and its impact on French cheese has just arrived and you might like to collect it'. So I think that we can do a lot to improve access.

I'm very keen on the concept of plurality of access points and access methods and I feel I should at least put a word in on behalf of the poor CD-ROM or the floppy disk. People like myself take great comfort in being able to hold and transport information. These devices are not necessarily a preservation tool, but certainly serve as additional access points to information.

Appropriate standards

Both Neil McLean and Nancy Elkington touched upon this issue. I think that it is important to recognise that we cannot use by-product formats as standards. Word processing formats should only be viewed as a process not as an archiving mechanism. Therefore, keeping word processor formats as a presentation medium I believe is doomed to failure. The big advantage of HTML is that it is a format which people are producing documents in. It is an appropriate way to preserve information if you need to keep information which has got a strong presentational orientation.

I agree with the concept of using something like SGML as a standard. I think we need to look at how we can automatically transform information from its representational form into its logical form in a pragmatic way. The company I work for has developed some simple software which will take ASCII or Word for Windows documents and convert them into an SGML format. It's a fairly simple SGML format but at least some of the logical structure is captured. I think that researchers can do more to take advantage of the regularity existing in all sorts of documents.

Who has a role to play?

Somebody was saying, 'Authors can't be bothered'. In the past, authors couldn't be bothered to preserve their work because they weren't the publishers. In the future, people who are going to be successful publishers as authors are going to have to be deeply involved. I think that we need to adopt a life cycle approach to electronic document management. There are many techniques of this type being used in large organisations. I think that collecting agencies need to become involved early in the life cycle.

Further research

I think Michael Lesk has already touched on this. We should be looking at a preservation migration workbench. There are lots of tools which we could put together to do things such as: take in a Word document with a series of different images and formats and automatically process and move it to an SGML format and arrange to have it stored. I liked the concept which Maggie Exon introduced: 'benign neglect'. I think we could create a tool to incorporate 'benign-just-in-time neglect'. At the point when Word 6.0 is becoming an endangered species, the system wakes itself and says, 'Hey, I need to be converted to something. Quick, convert me.' There is a lot of work which we can do to move documents and to assist people.

Adequate legislation

I think people need to be putting submissions in: it's unlikely that I will, but I think there are qualified people who should be aiming to do that.

Conclusions

I believe quite strongly that revolutions take a long time to arrive, but when they arrive, they are much bigger than you ever imagined. I don't think we've really seen the full impact of this revolution yet. I was talking to Maggie Exon yesterday evening over dinner and she was suggesting that it took a hundred years for the impact of moveable type printing to really take hold in the UK, in the sense that the day after it arrived they didn't sack all the people who were writing the manuscripts; it took a hundred years for that to happen.

We certainly need to learn from history. It may well be that the Internet turns out to be much like emu farming, where the people who made the money were the people who grew the chicks and sold the breeding stock to the other punters and none of the money ever came in from the outside population. I don't think that's true.

Maybe the electronic revolution is at about the same level of significance as the impact of a photocopier on automation and office practice. It's going to take time for the revolution to come and the areas which it will affect are as yet unknown.

What I would now like to do is to give my real talk (as per the title). I have three thoughts. There is a national workshop on the preservation of digital objects coming up in Canberra on the 6th of December and I would certainly urge people to attend that. I would certainly ask you to support the work of the Taskforce 2001 Working Party, which Keith Parrott introduced and reported on. I would finally like you to consider the work of Jan Lyall and the National Preservation Office who are playing a key role in this whole process. They can't do everything for you because there isn't enough time in the day for Jan to get around to it all. That's all I wanted to say. Thank you very much.


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Last updated 27 February 1998