Periodic hash value verification is also being cited as a critical
element in long term preservation of digital repositories - essentially
as a method to monitor potential deterioration of the digital
information. I was somewhat surprised at a great seminar on digital
repositories I attended a year ago in Seattle to hear a preference among
many for accessioning and maintaining native formats. The point was that
periodic conversion is not considered a viable long term option, among
other reasons, because of concerns about maintaining the financial
resources to continually perform such conversions/migrations in the long
term. Instead the emphasis was on methods of ingest: capturing
appropriate metadata to describe the records format in such a manner
that it could be reasonably reconstructed. One presentation in
particular focused on the long term preservation of digital performance
art. Rather than focus on preserving the particular hardware/software
associated with a given presentation, the curator has developed a
descriptive model that describes the performance in such a way that it
can be reconstructed - pointing out that the long term value is not
necessarily in the particular tools used at the time to do the
presentation, but in the content of the performance. Interestingly
enough, note that preservation of native formats does not necessarily
mean that recovery tools or techniques will always be available to
actually access them. In this sense, the analogy of monks preserving
ancient manuscripts that they could not actually read throughout the
Dark Ages is not out of line. Such efforts are the main reason why we
currently know anything at all about the ancient worlds of Greece and
Rome.

This particular group, made primarily of research librarians, special
collections curators, and archivists, was dealing with the ingest of
collections over which they have little or no control in the formats
used. Contrast this with NARA, which appears to be moving in the
direction of standardization of what they will accept. Its reasonable to
hope that these federal efforts will develop markets and systems to
lower the long term costs associated with digital preservation for all
of us, so we can skip the Dark Ages part.

Dwight Wallis, CRM
Records Administrator
Multnomah County Fleet, Records, Electronics, Distribution and Stores
(FREDS)
1620 S.E. 190th Avenue
Portland, OR 97233
Phone: (503)988-3741
Fax: (503)988-3754
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