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(Under repair & updating as of Oct. 2026... Please be patient)

What is digital longevity?

*** Note on accessing my references

Given the subject matter of this page, it is a true example of irony (unlike the common misuse of that term to refer to almost anything surprising or annoying) that the URLs in the citations below—as is the case for many World Wide Web references—tend to become invalid over time, as the sites that once provided them are renamed, reorganized, rehosted, or decommissioned. While attempting to keep up with this continuous "link rot" I also offer a local copy of each referenced document wherever possible, as a fallback. In all cases, I try to provide proper citations and links to the authors and/or publishing organizations, but I cannot guarantee that any such links will remain valid.

My major publications (with references) on this subject are:

Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation (html or pdf) was produced for the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) in January 1998 and provides an in-depth discussion of a range of proposed preservation approaches (ISBN 1-887334-63-7). A PDF version is also available.

My paper "Preserving Authentic Digital Information" discusses the question of what constitutes an authentically preserved digital document or record. The paper appears on pp. 51-68 of the May 2000 report Authenticity in a Digital Environment (html or pdf) . published by CLIR (ISBN 1-887334-77-7). My paper is also available here.

My report An Experiment in Using Emulation to Preserve Digital Publications, published in 2000 by the Dutch Royal Library (the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, or KB) [ISBN 9062 59 1442] discusses the use of emulation to preserve digital documents in the Dutch digital preservation testbed. (My report is also available in an earlier PDF version.) The Deposit System for Electronic Publications (DSEP) project that spawned this work (described in this report) was part of the Networked European Deposit Library (NEDLIB) effort (also available as PDF). A related testbed report discusses the use of migration for preservation.

For a report on the experimental use of emulation for digital preservation at the Dutch national library (the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, or KB), see Emulation for Digital Preservation in Practice: The Results (The International Journal of Digital Curation, Issue 2, Volume 2, 2007), also available here.

For an example of the impact of this early research on the use of emulation for digital preservation in the library context, see this discussion at eduKate Singapore.

Carrying Authentic, Understandable and Usable Digital Records Through Time (pdf) which I co-authored with Tora Bikson in 1999 for the Dutch National Archives and Ministry of the Interior, investigates issues surrounding the preservation of digital archival records. This report produced the design for a preservation testbed that was subsequently implemented by the Archives. See also this pre-publication draft of my white paper on emulation, along with other results.

"Scholarly Communication and Information Technology: Exploring the Impact of Changes in the Research Process on Archives" This 80+ page paper, co-authored with Avra Michelson, then at the U.S. National Archives, appeared in The American Archivist in 1992. It is available as a single large (6MB) scanned PDF file or as a set of separate PDF sections. I provide an overview of then-current and future information technology and predict its impacts on archival research in the Overview of Information Technology section of this paper. My first published proposal of the emulation approach to digital preservation appeared in the Conclusion and Recommendations section of this paper (Part II: Establishing a Strategy for the Future Usability of Electronic Records, p. 297, ff.), although it may be difficult to recognize. The paper is also available as RAND reprint RP187 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.7249/RP187).

My paper "Preservation of the Times" [which appeared in The Information Management Journal, March/April 2002, Vol 36, No. 2, pp. 38-43. ISSN 1535-2897 (ARMA International)] compares two approaches to using emulation for preservation.

Emulation: Context and Current Status (pdf) This white paper (of which I was the principal author) was prepared for the Dutch Archives Testbed project in June 2003. It discusses the use of emulation for the preservation of digital archival records.

The Erl King gives an overview of the renewal of a 1980s analog/digital interactive video artwork by Grahame Weinbren and Roberta Friedman. This work was undertaken by the Archiving the Avant-Garde project, a consortium effort supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. The renewed Erl King was the centerpiece of the Seeing Double exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, March 19 through May 16, 2004. My introduction to the above report discusses the technical options for renewing this piece. Additional information about this effort is given at the Guggenheim's Variable Media Initiative site and at the Daniel Langlois Foundation's site.

Renewing The Erl King (pdf) is my own, in-depth report on the Erl King renewal effort. This was also published in Millennium Film Journal (MJF), Hybrids, Issue Nos. 45/46 (Fall 2006), pp. 20-51.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) funded the 1-hour 1998 PBS film Into the Future: Information in the Electronic Age (directed by two-time Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker Terry Sanders), in which I discuss (along with many others) the problems of preserving digital information. A short initial clip of this film (or the entire film, with appropriate access), can be watched here.

Additional resources:

Numerous additional references are available at this excellent site, compiled by Howard Besser, as well as at the Cedars Project site, The CAMiLEON project's website, and the Dutch Archives Testbed project site.