Avoiding Technological

Quicksand:
Finding a Viable Technical Foundation
for Digital Preservation

A Report to
the Council on Library and Information Resources

by Jeff Rothenberg
January 1999
Commission on Preservation and Access
The Commission on Preservation and Access, a program of the Council on Library and Information
Resources, supports the efforts of libraries and archives to save endangered portions of their paper-based
collections and to meet the new preservation challenges of the digital environment. Working with
institutions around the world, CLIR disseminates knowledge of best preservation practices and promotes
a coordinated approach to preservation activity.

Digital Libraries
The Digital Libraries program of the Council on Library and Information Resources is committed to
helping libraries of all types and sizes understand the far-reaching implications of digitization. To that
end, CLIR supports projects and publications whose purpose is to build confidence in, and increase
understanding of, the digital component that libraries are now adding to their traditional print holdings.

ISBN 1-887334-63-7

Published by:

Council on Library and Information Resources

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Washington, DC 20036

Additional copies are available for $20.00 from the above address. Orders must be prepaid, with checks made
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The paper in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for
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Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Copyright 1999 by the Council on Library and Information Resources. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transcribed in any form without permission of the publisher. Requests for reproduction for noncommercial
purposes, including educational advancement, private study, or research will be granted. Full credit must be given to
both the author and the Council on Library and Information Resources.
Contents

Preface ..................................................................................................................... iv

Executive Summary ............................................................................................... v

1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1

2. The Digital Longevity Problem ...................................................................... 1

3. Preservation in the Digital Age ...................................................................... 2

4. The Scope of the Problem ................................................................................ 4

5. Technical Dimensions of the Problem ........................................................... 7

6. The Inadequacy of Most Proposed Approaches .......................................... 9

7. Criteria for an Ideal Solution ........................................................................ 16

8. The Emulation Solution ................................................................................. 17

9. Research Required for the Emulation Approach ....................................... 26

10. Summary .......................................................................................................... 30

References ............................................................................................................... 31
iv

Preface

In 1996, the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Re-

search Libraries Group issued the final report of the Task Force on
the Archiving of Digital Information. Chaired by John Garrett and
Donald Waters, the task force spent over a year analyzing the prob-
lem, considering options, consulting with others around the world,
and formulating a series of recommendations. The conclusion
reached by the impressive group of 21 experts was alarming—there
is, at present, no way to guarantee the preservation of digital infor-
mation. And it is not simply a technical problem. A serious commit-
ment to preserving digital information requires a legal environment
that enables preservation. It also means that specific organizations—
libraries, government agencies, corporations—must take responsibil-
ity for preservation by enacting new policies and creating the eco-
nomic means to secure survival of this generation’s knowledge into
the future.
The Council on Library and Information Resources, which ab-
sorbed the Commission on Preservation and Access in July 1997,
continues to search for answers to the troubling question of how dig-
ital information will be preserved. Raising public awareness is an
important goal, and we have pursued it vigorously. Since the publi-
cation of the task force report in 1996, we have spoken to library and
scholarly groups here and abroad, published a number of papers,
and produced an hour-long documentary film on the subject for
broadcast on public television. The film especially has made an im-
pression, and several observers have wondered why we have spent
so much time in describing the problems and so little in finding solu-
tions.
In fact, we have also been seeking solutions, and the present pa-
per by Jeff Rothenberg is the first in a series resulting from our ef-
forts. Each paper in the series will propose an approach to the preser-
vation of digital information. Each approach addresses the important
parts of the problem. We believe that it is best to assemble as many
ideas as possible, to place them before a knowledgeable audience,
and to stimulate debate about their strengths and weaknesses as so-
lutions to particular preservation problems.
Jeff Rothenberg is a senior research scientist of the RAND Corpo-
ration. His paper is an important contribution to our efforts.
 v

Executive Summary

There is as yet no viable long-term strategy to ensure that digital in-

formation will be readable in the future. Digital documents are vul-
nerable to loss via the decay and obsolescence of the media on which
they are stored, and they become inaccessible and unreadable when
the software needed to interpret them, or the hardware on which
that software runs, becomes obsolete and is lost. Preserving digital
documents may require substantial new investments, since the scope
of this problem extends beyond the traditional library domain, af-
fecting such things as government records, environmental and scien-
tific baseline data, documentation of toxic waste disposal, medical
records, corporate data, and electronic-commerce transactions.
This report explores the technical depth of the problem of long-
term digital preservation, analyzes the inadequacies of a number of
ideas that have been proposed as solutions, and elaborates the emu-
lation strategy. The central idea of the emulation strategy is to emu-
late obsolete systems on future, unknown systems, so that a digital
document’s original software can be run in the future despite being
obsolete. Though it requires further research and proof of feasibility,
this approach appears to have many advantages over the other ap-
proaches suggested and is offered as a promising candidate for a so-
lution to the problem of preserving digital material far into the fu-
ture. Since this approach was first outlined, it has received
considerable attention and, in the author’s view, is the only approach
yet suggested to offer a true solution to the problem of digital preser-
vation.
The long-term digital preservation problem calls for a long-lived
solution that does not require continual heroic effort or repeated in-
vention of new approaches every time formats, software or hardware
paradigms, document types, or recordkeeping practices change. The
approach must be extensible, since we cannot predict future changes,
and it must not require labor-intensive translation or examination of
individual documents. It must handle current and future documents
of unknown type in a uniform way, while being capable of evolving
as necessary. Furthermore, it should allow flexible choices and
tradeoffs among priorities such as access, fidelity, and ease of docu-
ment management.
Most approaches that have been suggested as solutions—print-
ing digital documents on paper, relying on standards to keep them
readable, reading them by running obsolete software and hardware
preserved in museums, or translating them so that they “migrate”
into forms accessible by future generations of software—are labor-
vi

intensive and ultimately incapable of preserving digital documents

in their original forms.
The best way to satisfy the criteria for a solution is to run the
original software under emulation on future computers. This is the
only reliable way to recreate a digital document’s original functional-
ity, look, and feel. Though it may not be feasible to preserve every
conceivable attribute of a digital document in this way, it should be
possible to recreate the document’s behavior as accurately as de-
sired—and to test this accuracy in advance.
The implementation of this emulation approach involves: (1) de-
veloping generalizable techniques for specifying emulators that will
run on unknown future computers and that capture all of those at-
tributes required to recreate the behavior of current and future digi-
tal documents; (2) developing techniques for saving—in human-
readable form—the metadata needed to find, access, and recreate
digital documents, so that emulation techniques can be used for
preservation; and (3) developing techniques for encapsulating docu-
ments, their attendant metadata, software, and emulator specifica-
tions in ways that ensure their cohesion and prevent their corrup-
tion. The only assumption that this approach makes about future
computers is that they will be able to perform any computable func-
tion and (optionally) that they will be faster and/or cheaper to use
than current computers.
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 1

1. Introduction In a very short time, preservation has developed into a

critically important part of managing a library’s most pre-
cious assets, its collections.
—Abby Smith, “Preservation in the Future Tense”

T
he vision of creating digital libraries that will be able to pre-
serve our heritage currently rests on technological quicksand.
There is as yet no viable long-term strategy to ensure that
digital information will be readable in the future. Not only are digital
documents vulnerable to loss via media decay and obsolescence, but
they become equally inaccessible and unreadable if the software
needed to interpret them—or the hardware on which that software
runs—is lost or becomes obsolete.
This report explores the technical depth of this problem, analyz-
es the inadequacies of a number of ideas that have been proposed as
solutions, and elaborates the emulation strategy, which is, in my
view, the only approach yet suggested to offer a true solution to the
problem of digital preservation (Rothenberg 1995a). Other proposed
solutions involve printing digital documents on paper, relying on
standards to keep them readable, reading them by running obsolete
software and hardware preserved in museums, or translating them
so that they “migrate” into forms accessible by future generations of
software. Yet all of these approaches are short-sighted, labor-inten-
sive, and ultimately incapable of preserving digital documents in
their original forms. Emulation, on the other hand, promises predict-
able, cost-effective preservation of original documents, by means of
running their original software under emulation on future computers.

2. The Digital Documents, data, records, and informational and cultural artifacts of
all kinds are rapidly being converted to digital form, if they were not
Longevity
created digitally to begin with. This rush to digitize is being driven
Problem by powerful incentives, including the ability to make perfect copies
of digital artifacts, to publish them on a wide range of media, to dis-
tribute and disseminate them over networks, to reformat and convert
them into alternate forms, to locate them, search their contents, and
retrieve them, and to process them with automated and semi-auto-
mated tools. Yet the longevity of digital content is problematic for a
number of complex and interrelated reasons (UNACCIS 1990, Lesk
1995, Morris 1998, Popkin and Cushman 1993, Rothenberg 1995b,
Getty 1998).
2 Avoiding Technological Quicksand

It is now generally recognized that the physical lifetimes of digi-

tal storage media are often surprisingly short, requiring information
to be “refreshed” by copying it onto new media with disturbing fre-
quency. The technological obsolescence of these media (and of the
hardware and software necessary to read them) poses a different and
equally urgent threat. Moreover, most digital documents and arti-
facts exist only in encoded form, requiring specific software to bring
their bit streams to life and make them truly usable; as these pro-
grams (or the hardware/software environments in which they run)
become obsolete, the digital documents that depend on them become
unreadable—held hostage to their own encoding. This problem is
paradoxical, given the fact that digital documents can be copied per-
fectly, which is often naively taken to mean that they are eternal. This
paradox prompted my ironic observation (Rothenberg 1997), “Digi-
tal documents last forever—or five years, whichever comes first.”
There is currently no demonstrably viable technical solution to this
problem; yet if it is not solved, our increasingly digital heritage is in
grave risk of being lost (Michelson and Rothenberg 1992, Morelli
1998, Swade 1998).
In addition to the technical aspects of this problem, there are ad-
ministrative, procedural, organizational, and policy issues surround-
ing the management of digital material. Digital documents are differ-
ent from traditional paper documents in ways that have significant
implications for the means by which they are generated, captured,
transmitted, stored, maintained, accessed, and managed. Paramount
among these differences is the greatly reduced lifetime of digital in-
formation without some form of active preservation. This mandates
new approaches to accessioning and saving digital documents to
avoid their loss. These approaches raise nontechnical issues concern-
ing jurisdiction, funding, responsibility for successive phases of the
digital document life cycle, and the development of policies requir-
ing adherence to standard techniques and practices to prevent the
loss of digital information. However, few of these nontechnical is-
sues can be meaningfully addressed in the absence of a sound, ac-
cepted technical solution to the digital longevity problem.

3. Preservation in The goal of any preservation program is to ensure long-

term, ready access to the information resources of an insti-
the Digital Age
tution.
—Abby Smith, “Preservation in the Future Tense”

Preservation constitutes one leg of a tripod that supports informa-

tional institutions such as libraries, the other legs being access and
the development and management of collections (Fox and Marchion-
ini 1998, Schurer 1998). Without preservation, access becomes impos-
sible, and collections decay and disintegrate.
Informational artifacts include documents, data, and records of
all kinds, in all media, which I refer to as “documents” here, for sim-
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 3

plicity (Roberts 1994). The essence of preserving informational arti-

facts is the retention of their meaning. This requires the ability to rec-
reate the original form and function of a document when it is access-
ed, for example, to establish its authenticity, validity, and evidential
value and to allow the document’s users to understand how its cre-
ator and original viewers saw it, what they were (and were not) able
to infer from it, what insights it may have conveyed to them, and
what aesthetic value it may have had for them.
My focus is on digital documents, by which I mean information-
al artifacts, some or all aspects of whose intended behavior or use
rely on their being encoded in digital form. The term “digital” in this
context denotes any means of representing sequences of discrete
symbolic values—each value having two or more unambiguously
distinguishable states—so that they can, at least in principle, be ac-
cessed, manipulated, copied, stored, and transmitted entirely by me-
chanical means, with high reliability.1
The preservation of digital documents involves a number of dis-
tinctive requirements. In particular, all such documents possess a
unique collection of core digital attributes that must be retained.
These attributes include their ability to be copied perfectly, to be ac-
cessed without geographic constraint, to be disseminated at virtually
no incremental cost (given the existence of appropriate digital infra-
structure), and to be machine-readable so that they can be accessed,
searched, and processed by automated mechanisms that can modify
them, reformat them, and perform arbitrary computations on their
contents in all phases of their creation and distribution. Furthermore,
new inherently digital (“born-digital”) document forms, such as dy-
namic, distributed, interactive hypertext and hypermedia, must re-
tain their unique functionality, including their ability to integrate in-
formation from disparate traditional sources, such as books,
periodicals, newspapers, mail, phone messages, data, imagery, and
video (Bearman 1991, Bearman 1992, Bikson 1997, Kenney 1997,
Michelson and Rothenberg 1992).
In response to the difficulty of saving digital documents (due to
factors such as media decay and software and hardware obsoles-
cence, discussed in detail below) it is sometimes suggested that they
be printed and saved in hard-copy form. This is a rear-guard action
and not a true solution. Printing any but the simplest, traditional
documents results in the loss of their unique functionality (such as
dynamic interaction, nonlinearity, and integration), and printing any
document makes it no longer truly machine-readable, which in turn
destroys its core digital attributes (perfect copying, access, distribu-
tion, and so forth). Beyond this loss of functionality, printing digital
documents sacrifices their original form, which may be of unique

1 I use the term digital information in preference to electronic information because it

more accurately captures the essential aspects of the problem. Digital
information can in principle be represented in nonelectronic form, for example,
by using optical or quantum techniques, whereas electronic information is not
necessarily digital.
4 Avoiding Technological Quicksand

historical, contextual, or evidential interest (Bearman 1993, Hed-

strom 1991, U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia 1993).
Proposed alternatives to printing digital documents include
translating digital documents into standard forms or extracting their
contents without regard to their original nature. Though these ap-
proaches have traditional analogues (such as the translation of an-
cient texts into the vernacular to give them a larger audience), they
are fraught with danger. The meaning of a document may be quite
fragile, since meaning is in the eye of the beholder: what may be a
trivial transformation to a casual reader may be a disastrous loss to a
scholar, historian, or lawyer. Examples of loss of meaning abound in
our daily experience of converting digital documents from their na-
tive form into that of some other software application in order to
read them. At its best, such conversion often sacrifices subtleties
(such as format, font, footnotes, cross-references, citations, headings,
numbering, shape, and color); at its worst, it leaves out entire seg-
ments (such as graphics, imagery, and sound) or produces meaning-
less garbage (Horsman 1994).
While it is often useful to create contemporary vernacular tran-
scriptions of historical documents (such as Shakespeare’s Sonnets or
the Declaration of Independence), society places a high value on re-
taining the originals so that we may verify that content has not been
lost in transcription (whether inadvertently or for nefarious ends), as
well as for scholarly and aesthetic purposes. For digital documents,
retaining an original may not mean retaining the original medium
(which rapidly decays and becomes obsolete), but it should mean
retaining the functionality, look, and feel of the original document.

The skills and judgment developed in preservation pro-

fessionals—the ability to discover the original form of an
object and the intent of its creator, and to prolong the life
of the object or return the object as nearly as possible to its
state at the time of its creation—are precisely the same
skill sets that are needed for the future, albeit practiced in
a radically different context.
—Abby Smith, “Preservation in the Future Tense”

4. The Scope of The preservation of digital documents is a matter of more than pure-
ly academic concern. A 1990 House of Representatives report cited a
the Problem
number of cases of significant digital records that had already been
lost or were in serious jeopardy of being lost (U. S. Congress 1990),
and the 1997 documentary film Into the Future (Sanders 1997) cited
additional cases (Bikson 1994, Bikson and Law 1993, Fonseca, Polles
and Almeida 1996, Manes 1998, NRC 1995).
In its short history, computer science has become inured to the
fact that every new generation of software and hardware technology
entails the loss of information, as documents are translated between
incompatible formats (Lesk 1992). The most serious losses are caused
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 5

by paradigm shifts (such as those between networked, hierarchical,

and relational databases), which often require the complete redesign
of documents (or databases) to migrate to the new paradigm. When-
ever this happens, documents that are not in continuing use may
well be orphaned by the demise of their original formats, that is, they
may be abandoned to save the cost of migration, while each docu-
ment that does migrate may be turned into something unrecogniza-
bly different from its original, which is generally lost.2 Even when
migration does not involve a major paradigm shift, it can result in
subtle losses of context and content. Yet aside from this ad hoc mi-
gration process, there exists no proven strategy for preserving (or
translating) documents over time (Bikson and Frinking 1993).
The scope of this problem extends beyond the traditional library
domain, affecting government records, environmental and scientific
baseline data, documentation of toxic waste disposal, medical
records (whose lifetime must exceed 100 years), corporate data (such
as the documentation of drug trials for pharmaceutical companies or
of geologic survey data for petrochemical companies), electronic-
commerce transactions, and electronic records needed to support
forthcoming digital government initiatives (Bikson 1994, Erlandsson
1994).
The library and archives communities have identified at least
some critical aspects of this problem and have recognized that pre-
serving digital documents may require substantial new investments
and commitments by institutions and government agencies (Bikson
forthcoming, Hedstrom 1993, Indiana University 1997, Waters and
Garrett 1996). Showing admirable foresight, these communities have
begun to discuss alternative economic and administrative policies
for funding and managing digital preservation and have begun to
develop conceptual frameworks for metadata that are not restricted
to the print medium (Day 1997, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
1998, IEEE 1997, Giguere 1996, Rothenberg 1996). Yet the lack of any
long-term technical solution to the problem of digital preservation
limits the efficacy of such explorations, since attempting to allocate
responsibilities and assess costs for a nonexistent process is of ques-
tionable value.

4.1 The need for triage

The practical problem of digital preservation can be viewed at three

different time scales. In the short term, many organizations are faced
with an urgent need to save digital material that is in imminent dan-
ger of becoming unreadable or inaccessible, or to retrieve digital
records that are already difficult to access. Yet the often heroic efforts
needed to save or retrieve such material may not be generally appli-

2 Documents whose continued use is crucial to the individuals or organizations

that own them are more likely to be included in the migration process, in
recognition of their importance, but this does not guarantee that their meaning
will not be inadvertently lost or corrupted.
6 Avoiding Technological Quicksand

cable to preserving digital documents far into the future, and the
techniques employed may not even be generalizable to solve similar
urgent problems that may arise in the future. These short-term ef-
forts therefore do not provide much leverage, in the sense that they
are not replicable for different document types, though they may still
be necessary for saving crucial records. In the medium term, organi-
zations must quickly implement policies and technical procedures to
prevent digital records from becoming vulnerable to imminent loss
in the near future. For the vast bulk of records—those being generat-
ed now, those that have been generated fairly recently, or those that
have been translated into formats and stored on media that are cur-
rently in use—the medium-term issue is how to prevent these
records from becoming urgent cases of imminent loss within the next
few years, as current media, formats, and software evolve and be-
come obsolete.
In the long term (which is the focus of this report), it is necessary
to develop a truly long-lived solution to digital longevity that does
not require continual heroic effort or repeated invention of new ap-
proaches every time formats, software or hardware paradigms, doc-
ument types, or recordkeeping practices change. Such an approach
must be extensible, in recognition of the fact that we cannot predict
future changes, and it must not require labor-intensive (and error-
prone) translation or examination of individual records. It must han-
dle current and future records of unknown type in a uniform way,
while being capable of evolving as necessary.

4.2 Types of digital information affected

Though most early digital documents have consisted largely of text,

the generation of multimedia records has increased rapidly in recent
years, to include audio recordings, graphical charts, photographic
imagery, and video presentations, among others. In the digital do-
main, all of these media can be combined into hypermedia records,
whose impact and expressivity can be expected to stimulate their in-
creased use. Whereas the bulk of existing digital documents may be
textual, multimedia and hypermedia records are likely to become
ever more popular and may well become dominant in the near fu-
ture. Any solution to digital preservation that is limited to text will
therefore quickly become obsolete. A true long-term solution should
be completely neutral to the form and content of the digital material
it preserves.

4.3 Contextual issues

The preservation and management of digital records involves inter-

related technical, administrative, procedural, organizational, and
policy issues, but a sound technical approach must form the founda-
tion on which everything else rests. Preserving digital records may
require substantial new investments and commitments by organiza-
tions, institutions and agencies, forcing them to adopt new economic
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 7

and administrative policies for funding and managing digital preser-

vation. Yet it is impossible to allocate responsibilities or assess costs
for an undefined process: until a viable technical approach to digital
longevity has been identified and developed, it is premature to
spend much effort attempting to design the administrative and orga-
nizational environment that will embed whatever technical approach
is ultimately adopted.

5. Technical Digital media are vulnerable to loss by two independent mecha-

nisms: the physical media on which they are stored are subject to
Dimensions of
physical decay and obsolescence, and the proper interpretation of
the Problem the documents themselves is inherently dependent on software.

5.1 Digital media suffer from physical

decay and obsolescence

There is reasonably widespread (though by no means universal)

awareness of the fact that digital storage media have severely limited
physical lifetimes. The National Media Lab has published test results
for a wide range of tapes, magnetic disks, CD-ROMs, and other me-
dia (Van Bogart 1996), showing that a tape, disk, or even CD that is
picked at random (that is, without prior evaluation of the vendor or
the specific batch of media) is unlikely to have a lifetime of even five
years (Lancaster 1986). Vendors and media scientists may argue ve-
hemently about such numbers, but accurate estimates are ultimately
largely irrelevant, since the physical lifetime of media is rarely the
constraining factor for digital preservation. Even if archival quality
media were introduced in the market, they would probably fail,
since they would quickly be made obsolete—despite their physical
longevity—by newer media having increased capacity, higher speed,
greater convenience, and lower price (Schurer 1998). This is a natural
outgrowth of the exponential improvement in storage density, speed,
and cost that has characterized digital media development for the
past several decades: the market makes older storage media obsolete
as newer, better media become available. The short lifetimes of eight-
inch floppy disks, tape cartridges and reels, hard-sectored disks, and
seven-track tapes, among others, demonstrate how quickly storage
formats become inaccessible.
Media obsolescence manifests itself in several ways: the medium
itself disappears from the market; appropriate drives capable of
reading the medium are no longer produced; and media-accessing
programs (device drivers) capable of controlling the drives and deci-
phering the encodings used on the medium are no longer written for
new computers. Upgrading to a new computer system therefore of-
ten requires abandoning an old storage medium, even if an organiza-
tion still has documents stored on that medium.
The dual problems of short media lifetime and rapid obsoles-
cence have led to the nearly universal recognition that digital infor-
8 Avoiding Technological Quicksand

mation must be copied to new media (refreshed) on a very short cy-

cle (every few years). Copying is a straightforward solution to these
media problems, though it is not trivial: in particular, the copy pro-
cess must avoid corrupting documents via compression, encryption,
or changing data formats.
In addition, as media become more dense, each copy cycle aggre-
gates many disks, tapes, or other storage units onto a single new unit
of storage (say, a CD or its successor, a DVD, digital video disk or
digital versatile disk). This raises the question of how to retain any
labeling information and metadata that may have been associated
with the original media: since it is infeasible to squeeze the contents
of the labels of 400 floppy disks to fit on the label of a single CD, la-
bel information must be digitized to ensure that it continues to ac-
company the records it describes. But whereas labels are directly hu-
man-readable, digitized information is not; labels and metadata must
therefore be digitized in such a way that they remain more easily
readable by humans than are the documents they describe. This may
seem a relatively trivial aspect of the problem, but it has serious im-
plications (Bearman 1992), as discussed below.

5.2 Digital documents are inherently

software-dependent

Though media problems are far from trivial, they are but the tip of
the iceberg. Far more problematic is the fact that digital documents
are in general dependent on application software to make them ac-
cessible and meaningful. Copying media correctly at best ensures
that the original bit stream of a digital document will be preserved.
But a stream of bits cannot be made self-explanatory, any more than
hieroglyphics were self-explanatory for the 1,300 years before the
discovery of the Rosetta Stone. A bit stream (like any stream of sym-
bols) can represent anything: not just text but also data, imagery, au-
dio, video, animated graphics, and any other form or format, current
or future, singly or combined in a hypermedia lattice of pointers
whose formats themselves may be arbitrarily complex and idiosyn-
cratic. Without knowing what is intended, it is impossible to deci-
pher such a stream. In certain restricted cases, it may be possible to
decode the stream without additional knowledge: for example, if a
bit stream is known to represent simple, linear text, deciphering it is
amenable to cryptographic techniques. But in general, a bit stream
can be made intelligible only by running the software that created it,
or some closely related software that understands it.
This point cannot be overstated: in a very real sense, digital doc-
uments exist only by virtue of software that understands how to ac-
cess and display them; they come into existence only by virtue of
running this software.

When all data are recorded as 0s and 1s, there is, essential-
ly, no object that exists outside of the act of retrieval. The
demand for access creates the ‘object,’ that is, the act of
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 9

retrieval precipitates the temporary reassembling of 0s

and 1s into a meaningful sequence that can be decoded by
software and hardware.
—Abby Smith, “Preservation in the Future Tense”

As this statement implies, the only reliable way (and often the
only possible way) to access the meaning and functionality of a digi-
tal document is to run its original software—either the software that
created it or some closely related software that understands it
(Swade 1998). Yet such application software becomes obsolete just as
fast as do digital storage media and media-accessing software. And
although we can save obsolete software (and the operating system
environment in which it runs) as just another bit stream, running
that software requires specific computer hardware, which itself be-
comes obsolete just as quickly. It is therefore not obvious how we can
use a digital document’s original software to view the document in
the future on some unknown future computer (which, for example,
might use quantum rather than binary states to perform its computa-
tions). This is the crux of the technical problem of preserving digital
documents.

5.3 Additional considerations

Any technical solution must also be able to cope with issues of cor-
ruption of information, privacy, authentication, validation, and pre-
serving intellectual property rights. This last issue is especially com-
plex for documents that are born digital and therefore have no single
original instance, since traditional notions of copies are inapplicable
to such documents. Finally, any technical solution must be feasible in
terms of the societal and institutional responsibilities and the costs
required to implement it.

6. The Inadequacy Most approaches that have been proposed fall into one of four cate-
gories: (1) reliance on hard copy, (2) reliance on standards, (3) reli-
of Most Proposed
ance on computer museums, or (4) reliance on migration. Though
Approaches some of these may play a role in an ultimate solution, none of them
comes close to providing a solution by itself, nor does their combina-
tion.

6.1 Reliance on hard copy

It is sometimes suggested that digital documents be printed and

saved as hard copy. This is not a true solution to the problem, since
many documents (especially those that are inherently digital, such as
hypermedia) cannot meaningfully be printed at all, or would lose
many of their uniquely digital attributes and capabilities if they were
printed. Even digital renditions of traditional documents (such as
linear text) lose their core digital attributes by being printed; that is,
10 Avoiding Technological Quicksand

they sacrifice direct machine-readability, which means they can no

longer be copied perfectly, transmitted digitally, searched or pro-
cessed by computer programs, and so forth. Similarly, attempting to
save digital documents by printing the 0s and 1s of their bit streams
on paper (or engraving them in metal) sacrifices their machine-read-
ability and the core digital attributes that it enables (Bearman 1993,
U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia 1993).
Moreover, any such scheme destroys whatever interactive or dy-
namic functionality an inherently digital document (or a digital ren-
dition of a traditional document) may have, since the document’s
original software can no longer be run. (While a human reader might
be able to ignore the errors introduced by the optical scanning and
character recognition of a printed version of a digital document,
computer programs are far less tolerant of the errors that this process
would introduce when scanning a printed sequence of 0s and 1s.)
For all of these reasons, saving digital documents by printing them
(whether rendering their content or printing their bit streams) does
not offer a solution to the true problem of digital preservation.

6.2 Reliance on standards

On the face of it, reliance on standards appears to offer a solution by

allowing digital documents to be represented in forms that will en-
dure into the future and for which future software will always pro-
vide accessibility. One version of this argument offers the relational
database (RDB) as a paradigmatic example of how this might work
(NARA 1991, Thibodeau 1991). This argument contends that since all
relational database management systems (RDBMSs) are based on the
same mathematical foundation (Codd 1982), any RDB that is acces-
sioned by an institution can be translated without loss into the spe-
cific RDB form recognized by the RDBMS used by that institution.
Even if the institution later changes RDBMSs, all of its RDBs should
be able to migrate to the new RDBMS without loss, since all RDBMSs
support the same baseline functionality (UNACCIS 1990, 1992).
While this argument appears convincing, it fails in several signif-
icant ways. First, precisely because the relational model legislates a
standard baseline of functionality, real RDBMSs must distinguish
themselves in the marketplace by introducing proprietary features
that extend the relational model (such as “outer” joins, support for
views, unique diagramming methods for data modeling, and the
like). Any RDB that makes use of such proprietary features becomes
at least somewhat nonstandard and will lose some of its functional-
ity if translated into some other RDBMS (Bikson and Frinking 1993).
In this way standardization sows the seeds of its own destruction by
encouraging vendors to implement nonstandard features in order to
secure market share. Users are motivated to use such features be-
cause they provide enhanced functionality, but using these features
produces nonstandard databases that are likely to be orphaned by
reliance on standards, since standards enforce strict limitations on
what they can represent, and thereby preserve.
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 11

In addition, far from being a paradigmatic example, the relation-

al database is actually unique: no other kind of digital document
rests on an underlying formal mathematical foundation that can
serve as the basis for its standardization. Word-processing docu-
ments, spreadsheets, graphics and image files, hypermedia, anima-
tion, and audio and video formats are still evolving so rapidly that it
is unrealistic to expect definitive standards for any of these forms to
emerge in the near future. Though standards continue to be devel-
oped for many kinds of digital documents, they are almost always
informal, ad hoc, and relatively short-lived. Moreover, since they
lack a formal underpinning, they often compete with rival standards
produced for different purposes or by different groups. This leads to
the sad but true statement, attributed to Andrew S. Tanenbaum,
“One of the great things about standards is that there are so many
different ones to choose from!”
Finally, the relational database example demonstrates a funda-
mental flaw in the standards-based approach. Just as the relational
paradigm replaced earlier network and hierarchical database para-
digms, it is currently under attack by the new object-oriented data-
base (OODB) paradigm, which may well replace it or at least relegate
it to the role of a low-level storage mechanism hidden beneath future
object-oriented database management systems (OODBMSs). As was
the case with previous database paradigm shifts, the transition from
relational to object-oriented databases cannot be made simply by au-
tomatically translating RDBs into OODBs. The paradigms are so dif-
ferent that such translation is typically meaningless: even when it is
possible, the result is likely to possess neither the formal rigor of the
original relational form nor the enhanced semantic expressiveness of
the new object-oriented form. This illustrates the fact that even the
best standards are often bypassed and made irrelevant by the inevi-
table paradigm shifts that characterize information science—and will
continue to do so.
Proponents of standards often argue that the way to deal with
the problem of paradigm shifts is to force digital documents into cur-
rent standard forms (even if this sacrifices some of their functional-
ity) and then translate them, when current standards become obso-
lete, into whatever standards supplant the obsolete ones.3 This is
analogous to translating Homer into modern English by way of ev-
ery intervening language that has existed during the past 2,500
years. The fact that scholars do not do this (but instead find the earli-
est original they can, which they then translate directly into the cur-
rent vernacular) is indicative of the fact that something is always lost
in translation. Rarely is it possible to recover the original by retrans-
lating the translated version back into the original language.
Not even character encodings last forever: ASCII (the venerable
7-bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is slowly
giving way to Unicode (a newer 16-bit character set). Furthermore,
the history of these encodings shows that successful standards do

3 This approach is the standards-based version of migration, discussed below.

12 Avoiding Technological Quicksand

not always subsume their competitors, as exemplified by the ascen-

dance of ASCII over EBCDIC (the 8-bit Extended Binary Coded Deci-
mal Interchange Code long used by IBM) and the APL character set
(designed for Iverson’s “A Programming Language”), despite the
fact that ASCII cannot represent all of their characters.
Nevertheless, standards should not be dismissed. Some stan-
dards (notably standard generalized markup language, SGML, and
its offspring) have proven highly extensible and worthwhile within
their limited scope. Since text is likely always to be a part of most
documents, SGML provides a useful capability (Coleman and Willis
1997), even though it does not by itself solve the problems of nontex-
tual representation or of representing dynamic, interactive docu-
ments. In fact, if SGML had been adopted as a common interlingua
(a commonly translatable intermediate form) among word process-
ing programs, it would have greatly relieved the daily conversion
problems that plague most computer users; yet this has not occurred,
implying that even well-designed standards do not necessarily
sweep the marketplace (Bikson 1997). Nevertheless, converting digi-
tal documents into standard forms, and migrating to new standards
if necessary, may be a useful interim approach while a true long-term
solution is being developed. I also suggest below that standards may
play a minor role in a long-term solution by providing a way to keep
metadata and annotations readable.

6.3 Reliance on computer museums

To avoid the dual problems of corruption via translation and aban-

donment at paradigm shifts, some have suggested that computer
museums be established, where old machines would run original
software to access obsolete documents (Swade 1998). While this ap-
proach exudes a certain technological bravado, it is flawed in a num-
ber of fundamental ways. It is unlikely that old machines could be
kept running indefinitely at any reasonable cost, and even if they
were, this would limit true access to the original forms of old digital
documents to a very few sites in the world, thereby again sacrificing
many of these documents’ core digital attributes.
Furthermore, this approach ignores the fact that old digital docu-
ments (and the original software needed to access them) will rarely
survive on their original digital media. If an obsolete digital docu-
ment and its software survive into the future, this will probably be
because their bit streams have been copied onto new media that did
not exist when the document’s original computer was current. For
example, an old word processing file from a 1970s personal comput-
er system will not still exist on the 8-inch floppy disk that was native
to that system but will instead have migrated onto a 3.5 inch floppy,
a CD-ROM, or perhaps a DVD. The obsolete document would there-
fore have to be read by an obsolete machine from a new medium for
which that machine has no physical drive, no interface, and no de-
vice software. The museum approach would therefore require build-
ing unique new device interfaces between every new medium and
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 13

every obsolete computer in the museum as new storage media

evolve, as well as coding driver software for these devices, which
would demand maintaining programming skills for each obsolete
machine. This seems hopelessly labor-intensive and ultimately infea-
sible.
Finally, computer chips themselves have limited physical life-
times. Integrated circuits decay due to processes such as metal mi-
gration (the traces that define circuit connections on the chips mi-
grate through the substrate over time) and dopant diffusion (the
atoms that make semiconductors semiconduct diffuse away over
time). Even if obsolete computers were stored carefully, maintained
religiously, and never used, aging processes such as these would
eventually render them inoperative; using them routinely to access
obsolete digital documents would undoubtedly accelerate their de-
mise.
One role that computer museums might play in preservation is
to perform heroic efforts to retrieve digital information from old stor-
age media. If an old disk or tape is found that may indeed still have
readable information on it, an obsolete machine in the museum
(which would presumably have a drive and software for the medi-
um in question) could be used in a last-ditch attempt to tease the bits
off the medium, as an alternative to electron microscopy or other
equally extreme measures. A second role for computer museums
might be in verifying the behavior of emulators, as discussed below.
Beyond these limited roles, however, computer museums do not ap-
pear to be a serious option for the long-term preservation of digital
documents.

6.4 Reliance on migration

The approach that most institutions are adopting (if only by default)
is to expect digital documents to become unreadable or inaccessible
as their original software becomes obsolete and to translate them
into new forms as needed whenever this occurs (Bikson and Frink-
ing 1993, Dollar 1992). This is the traditional migration approach of
computer science. While it may be better than nothing (better than
having no strategy at all or denying that there is a problem), it has
little to recommend it.4
Migration is by no means a new approach: computer scientists,
data administrators and data processing personnel have spent de-
cades performing migration of data, documents, records, and pro-
grams to keep valuable information alive and usable. Though it has
been employed widely (in the absence of any alternative), the nearly
universal experience has been that migration is labor-intensive, time-
consuming, expensive, error-prone, and fraught with the danger of
losing or corrupting information. Migration requires a unique new
solution for each new format or paradigm and each type of docu-

4The migration approach is often linked to the use of standards, but standards
are not intrinsically a part of migration.
14 Avoiding Technological Quicksand

ment that is to be converted into that new form. Since every para-
digm shift entails a new set of problems, there is not necessarily
much to be learned from previous migration efforts, making each
migration cycle just as difficult, expensive, and problematic as the
last. Automatic conversion is rarely possible, and whether conver-
sion is performed automatically, semiautomatically, or by hand, it is
very likely to result in at least some loss or corruption, as documents
are forced to fit into new forms.
As has been proven repeatedly during the short history of com-
puter science, formats, encodings, and software paradigms change
often and in surprising ways. Of the many dynamic aspects of infor-
mation science, document paradigms, computing paradigms, and
software paradigms are among the most volatile, and their evolution
routinely eludes prediction. Relational and object-oriented databases,
spreadsheets, Web-based hypermedia documents, e-mail attach-
ments, and many other paradigms have appeared on the scene with
relatively little warning, at least from the point of view of most com-
puter users. Each new paradigm of this kind requires considerable
conversion of programs, documents, and work styles, whether per-
formed by users themselves or by programmers, data administra-
tors, or data processing personnel.
Even though some new paradigms subsume the ones they re-
place, they often still require a significant conversion effort. For ex-
ample, the spreadsheet paradigm subsumes simple textual tables,
but converting an existing table into a meaningful spreadsheet re-
quires defining the formulas that link the entries in the table, al-
though these relationships are likely to have been merely implicit in
the original textual form (and long since forgotten). Similarly, word
processing subsumes simple text editing, but conversion of a docu-
ment from a simple textual form into a specific word processing for-
mat requires that fonts, paragraph types, indentation, highlighting,
and so forth, be specified, in order to make use of the new medium
and avoid producing a result that would otherwise be unacceptably
old-fashioned, if not illegible.
One of the worst aspects of migration is that it is impossible to
predict what it will entail. Since paradigm shifts cannot be predicted,
they may necessitate arbitrarily complex conversion for some or all
digital documents in a collection. In reality, of course, particularly
complex conversions are unlikely to be affordable in all cases, lead-
ing to the abandonment of individual documents or entire corpora
when conversion would be prohibitively expensive.
In addition, as when refreshing media, there is a degree of ur-
gency involved in migration. If a given document is not converted
when a new paradigm first appears, even if the document is saved in
its original form (and refreshed by being copied onto new media),
the software required to access its now-obsolete form may be lost or
become unusable due to the obsolescence of the required hardware,
making future conversion difficult or impossible. Though this urgen-
cy is driven by the obsolescence of software and hardware, rather
than by the physical decay and obsolescence of the media on which
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 15

digital documents are stored, it is potentially just as crucial. There-

fore migration cannot generally be postponed without incurring the
risk that it may become impossible in the future, and that the docu-
ments may be irretrievably lost. Worse yet, this problem does not oc-
cur just once for a given document (when its original form becomes
obsolete) but recurs throughout the future, as each form into which
the document has migrated becomes obsolete in turn.
Furthermore, because the cycles of migration that must be per-
formed are determined by the emergence of new formats or para-
digms, which cannot be controlled or predicted, it is essentially im-
possible to estimate when migration will have to be performed for a
given type of document—the only reliable prediction being that any
given type of document is very likely to require conversion into
some unforeseeable new form within some random (but probably
small) number of years. Since different format changes and para-
digm shifts affect different (and unpredictable) types of documents,
it is likely that some of the documents within a given corpus will re-
quire migration before others, unless the corpus consists entirely of a
single type of document (which becomes less likely as documents
make increasing use of hypermedia, since a single hypermedia docu-
ment consists of component subdocuments of various types). This
implies that any given corpus is likely to require migration on an ar-
bitrarily (and uncontrollably) short cycle, determined by whichever
of the component types of any of its documents is the next to be af-
fected by a new format or paradigm shift.
Finally, migration does not scale well. Because it is labor-inten-
sive and highly dependent on the particular characteristics of indi-
vidual document formats and paradigms, migration will derive little
benefit from increased computing power. It is unlikely that general-
purpose automated or semiautomated migration techniques will
emerge, and if they do, they should be regarded with great suspicion
because of their potential for silently corrupting entire corpora of
digital documents by performing inadvertently destructive conver-
sions on them. As the volume of our digital holdings increases over
time, each migration cycle will face a greater challenge than the last,
making the essentially manual methods available for performing mi-
gration increasingly inadequate to the task.
In summary, migration is essentially an approach based on wish-
ful thinking. Because we cannot know how things will change in the
future, we cannot predict what we will have to do to keep a given
digital document (or type of document) accessible and readable. We
can merely predict that document formats, software and hardware
will become obsolete, that paradigms will shift in unpredictable
ways (unpredictability being the essence of a paradigm shift), and
that we will often have to do something. Since different changes may
apply to different kinds of documents and records, we must expect
such changes to force the migration of different kinds of documents
on independent, unrelated schedules, with each document type (and
perhaps even individual documents or their components) requiring
specialized, labor-intensive handling. We cannot predict how much
16 Avoiding Technological Quicksand

effort, time, or expense migration will require, how successful it will

be in each case, how much will be lost in each conversion, nor how
many of our documents will be corrupted, orphaned, or lost in each
migration cycle. Furthermore, we can expect each cycle to be a
unique experience that derives little or no benefit or cost savings
from previous cycles, since each migration will pose a new set of
unique problems.
In the absence of any alternative, a migration strategy may be
better than no strategy at all; however, to the extent that it provides
merely the illusion of a solution, it may in some cases actually be
worse than nothing. In the long run, migration promises to be expen-
sive, unscalable, error-prone, at most partially successful, and ulti-
mately infeasible.

7. Criteria for an In contrast to the above strategies, an ideal approach should provide
a single, extensible, long-term solution that can be designed once
Ideal Solution
and for all and applied uniformly, automatically, and in synchrony
(for example, at every future refresh cycle) to all types of documents
and all media, with minimal human intervention. It should provide
maximum leverage, in the sense that implementing it for any docu-
ment type should make it usable for all document types. It should
facilitate document management (cataloging, deaccessioning, and so
forth) by associating human-readable labeling information and meta-
data with each document. It should retain as much as desired (and
feasible) of the original functionality, look, and feel of each original
document, while minimizing translation so as to minimize both la-
bor and the potential for loss via corruption. If translation is un-
avoidable (as when translating labeling information), the approach
should guarantee that this translation will be reversible, so that the
original form can be recovered without loss.
The ideal approach should offer alternatives for levels of safety
and quality, volume of storage, ease of access, and other attributes at
varying costs, and it should allow these alternatives to be changed
for a given document, type of document, or corpus at any time in the
future. It should provide single-step access to all documents, without
requiring multiple layers of encapsulation to be stripped away to ac-
cess older documents, while allowing the contents of a digital docu-
ment to be extracted for conversion into the current vernacular, with-
out losing the original form of the document. It should offer up-front
acceptance testing at accession time, to demonstrate that a given doc-
ument will be accessible in the future. Finally, the only assumptions
it should make about future computers are that they will be able to
perform any computable function and (optionally) that they will be
faster and/or cheaper to use than current computers.
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 17

8. The Emulation In light of the foregoing analysis, I propose that the best (if not the
Solution only) way to satisfy the above criteria is to somehow run a digital
document’s original software. This is the only reliable way to recre-
ate a digital document’s original functionality, look, and feel. The
central idea of the approach I describe here is to enable the emula-
tion of obsolete systems on future, unknown systems, so that a digi-
tal document’s original software can be run in the future despite be-
ing obsolete. Though it may not be feasible to preserve every
conceivable attribute of a digital document in this way, it should be
possible to recreate the document’s behavior as accurately as de-
sired—and to test this accuracy in advance.
The implementation of this emulation approach would involve:
(1) developing generalizable techniques for specifying emulators that
will run on unknown future computers and that capture all of those
attributes required to recreate the behavior of current and future dig-
ital documents; (2) developing techniques for saving—in human-
readable form—the metadata needed to find, access, and recreate
digital documents, so that emulation techniques can be used for
preservation; and (3) developing techniques for encapsulating docu-
ments, their attendant metadata, software, and emulator specifica-
tions in ways that ensure their cohesion and prevent their corrup-
tion. Since this approach was first outlined (Michelson and
Rothenberg 1992, Rothenberg 1995a), it has received considerable
attention and has been cited as the only proposed approach that ap-
pears to offer a true solution to the problem of digital preservation
(Erlandson 1996).

8.1 The right stuff

In principle, the proposed solution involves encapsulating three

kinds of information with each digital document. In practice, there
are a number of ways of doing this, some of which would be safer
(but would use more storage), while others would involve somewhat
more risk (but would use less storage). Figure 1 shows a logical view
of this encapsulation. For clarity all items are shown explicitly, repre-
senting the logical model, although in practice, items that are re-
quired by many different documents might be stored in centralized
repositories and pointed to by each document, rather than being rep-
licated as part of each document.
The first kind of information to be encapsulated comprises the
document and its software environment. Central to the encapsula-
tion is the digital document itself, consisting of one or more files rep-
resenting the original bit stream of the document as it was stored and
accessed by its original software. In addition, the encapsulation con-
tains the original software for the document, itself stored as one or
more files representing the original executable bit stream of the ap-
plication program that created or displayed the document. A third
set of files represents the bit streams of the operating system and any
other software or data files comprising the software environment in
which the document’s original application software ran. It must be
18 Avoiding Technological Quicksand

guaranteed that these bit streams will be copied verbatim when stor-
age media are refreshed, to avoid corruption. This first group of en-
capsulated items represents the original document in its entire soft-
ware context: given a computing platform capable of emulating the
document’s original hardware platform, this information should rec-
reate the behavior of the original document.
The second type of information in the encapsulation of a docu-
ment consists of a specification of an emulator for the document’s
original computing platform. The specification must provide suffi-
cient information to allow an emulator to be created that will run on
any conceivable computer (so long as the computer is capable of per-
forming any computable function). This emulator specification can-
not be an executable program, since it must be created without
knowledge of the future computers on which it will run. Among oth-
er things, it must specify all attributes of the original hardware plat-
form that are deemed relevant to recreating the behavior of the origi-
nal document when its original software is run under emulation.
Only one emulator specification need be developed for any given
hardware platform: a copy of it (or pointer to it) can then be encapsu-
lated with every document whose software uses that platform. This
provides the key to running the software encapsulated with the doc-
ument: assuming that the emulator specification is sufficient to pro-
duce a working emulator, the document can be read (accessed in its
original form) by running its original software under this emulator.
The final type of information in the encapsulation of a document
consists of explanatory material, labeling information, annotations,
metadata about the document and its history, and documentation for
the software and (emulated) hardware included in the encapsulation.
This material must first explain to someone in the future how to use
the items in the encapsulation to read the encapsulated digital docu-
ment. In order to fulfill this function, at least the top level of this ex-
planatory material must remain human-readable in the future, to
serve as a “bootstrap” in the process of opening and using the encap-
sulation. This is one place where standards may find a niche in this
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 19

approach: simple textual annotation standards (which might evolve

over time) would provide one way of keeping explanatory material
human-readable. If translation of this explanatory material is re-
quired to keep it human-readable (that is, if the annotation standards
themselves evolve), the translation might be performed when the
encapsulation is copied to new media: I refer to this limited form of
translation as transliteration.5 Any such translation must be revers-
ible without loss, to ensure (and make it possible to verify) that the
explanatory material is not corrupted. (These same techniques must
be used to store emulator specifications, which must also remain hu-
man-readable in the future.) Additional metadata in the encapsula-
tion describe the original document and provide labeling informa-
tion that must accompany the document. Finally, additional
metadata must provide historical context, provenance, life cycle his-
tory, and administrative information to help manage the document
over time.

8.2 Annotate, Encapsulate, Transliterate

and Emulate

Given a suitable emulator specification for a given obsolete hard-

ware platform (which need only be created once for all documents
whose software uses that platform), the process of preserving a digi-
tal document can be summarized as a sequence of four steps: anno-
tate, encapsulate, transliterate and emulate. That is, (1) create any
annotations needed to provide context for the document and to ex-
plain how to open and use the encapsulation; (2) encapsulate with
the document all of the items described in the previous section;
(3) when necessary (optionally, at each media refresh cycle), translit-
erate annotations to keep them human-readable; and (4) in the fu-
ture, open the encapsulation, create the specified emulator, and run
the emulator on a future computer. This allows the original software
to be run under emulation, thereby recreating the saved document.
The sequence of events that must work in order for the emula-
tion approach to allow an obsolete digital document to be read is il-
lustrated in figure 2. The items in the top row of this figure represent
elements that must be present for the scheme to work. Starting from
the left, we must have a way of interpreting an emulator specifica-
tion to produce a working hardware emulator (whether this interpre-
tation is performed manually or automatically), and we must have a
readable emulator specification for the required obsolete hardware
(the original hardware and software are denoted HW and OS, re-

5 While transliteration need not be tied to refresh cycles, doing so minimizes the
number of passes that must be made through a collection of digital material. If a
single annotation standard is selected for all documents in a given corpus or
repository during a given epoch to simplify document management,
transliteration could be performed for all documents in a collection in lock-step,
just as media refreshing is done in lock-step. Though transliteration does not
necessarily have to be done at the same time as refreshing, doing so would be
more efficient (though potentially riskier) than performing transliteration and
refreshing at different times.
20 Avoiding Technological Quicksand

spectively). This combination of a readable emulator specification

and an interpreter for such specifications allows us to produce an
emulator for the original hardware.
As shown in the middle of the top row, we then need a working,
current computer and operating system (denoted HW’ and OS’) that
can run the emulator: together, these produce a running OS’ environ-
ment, which is required to support both the emulation branch
(shown by heavy lines at the left of the figure) and the media-access
branch (shown at right). Following the media-access branch down
from the upper right, the obsolete digital document itself must also
exist on some current storage medium (to which it will have presum-
ably migrated from its original medium) for which physical drives
and device software are available. Assuming we can run the neces-
sary driver software for this medium under the current hardware/
operating system environment (HW’/OS’), we can thereby access the
bit stream of the original document. Finally, going back to the main,
emulation branch, running the emulator of the original, obsolete
hardware (HW) in the current HW’/OS’ environment effectively
“runs” the original hardware (under emulation); this allows us to
run the original, saved (obsolete) operating system (OS), which in
turn allows us to run the original, saved (obsolete) application soft-
ware (SW) needed to read the saved (obsolete) digital document.
Though it may appear prohibitively inefficient to have to create
and use an emulator to read each old document, three factors should
be kept in mind. First, the inclusion of contextual annotation in the
encapsulation makes it unnecessary to use emulation to perform rou-
tine management functions on the document, such as copying it, fil-
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 21

ing it, or distributing it. Emulation is needed only when the docu-
ment is to be read or when its content is to be extracted for transla-
tion into some vernacular form.6
Second, an emulator specification for a given obsolete hardware
platform need be created only once for all documents whose soft-
ware uses that platform. This provides tremendous leverage: if an
emulator specification is created for any document or document
type, it will confer longevity on all other digital documents that use
any of the software that runs on the given hardware platform.
Third, an emulator for a given obsolete platform need be created
only once for each future platform on which emulation is required to
run. Once created for each new generation of computer, the emulator
for a given obsolete platform can be run whenever desired on any
computer of that new generation. Generating new, running emula-
tors for new computing platforms from saved emulator specifica-
tions will therefore be a rare process: once it has been done to access
any document on a new platform, the resulting emulator for that
platform can be used to access all other documents saved using the
emulation scheme. The process of generating an emulator from its
specifications can therefore be relatively inefficient (since it need be
performed only infrequently), so long as the emulator that is gener-
ated is reasonably efficient when it runs.

8.3 Ancillary issues

Saving proprietary software, hardware specifications, and documen-

tation, as required by this emulation strategy, raises potential intel-
lectual property issues. Hardware specifications of the kind required
for emulation are not necessarily proprietary, and since emulator
specifications are not currently produced by hardware vendors (or
anyone else), their intellectual ownership is as yet undefined. While
application software and its documentation is often proprietary, the
application programs required to access saved documents in general
need be no more than readers for the desired document format, rath-
er than editing programs. Such readers (along with their documenta-
tion) are often provided free by software vendors to encourage the
use of their editing software. Operating system software and drivers,
on the other hand, may very well be proprietary, and intellectual
property restrictions or fees for these essential items must be respect-
ed if this approach is to work. Since the whole point of encapsulating
this software is to make it available in the future, when it would oth-
erwise be obsolete, one possible strategy would be to negotiate the
free use of obsolete software, or to amend the copyright law to ex-
tend the principle of fair use to cover obsolete software.
For this strategy to work, responsibility for developing emulator
specifications of the kind required would have to be accepted by one
or more agencies, institutions, or market segments. Similarly, explan-

6 The emulation environment must be designed to allow such extraction in order

to facilitate the generation of vernacular versions of obsolete documents.
22 Avoiding Technological Quicksand

atory text standards would have to be developed and maintained,

and responsibility would have to be accepted for refreshing media
and performing transliteration (translating this explanatory material
into new human-readable forms) when necessary.

8.4 Strengths and limitations of the

emulation approach

It may appear that emulating a hardware platform simply to run ap-

plication software is unnecessarily roundabout. If what is really de-
sired is to emulate the behavior of the original digital document,
why go to the trouble of running its original software at all? The an-
swer to this is that we do not yet have any formal (or even informal)
way of describing the full range of behaviors possible for even the
simplest of digital documents, such as are produced by word pro-
cessing programs. Describing the behavior of dynamic, interactive,
hypermedia documents poses a far greater challenge. The only ade-
quate specification of the behavior of a digital document is the one
implicit in its interaction with its software. The only way to recreate
the behavior of a digital document is to run its original software.
It may then be argued that instead of actually running original
software, we might emulate the behavior of that software. This
would provide considerable leverage over emulating the behavior of
individual documents, since a given application program may be
used for thousands (or millions) of different documents; emulating
the behavior of that program would avoid having to understand and
recreate the behavior of each individual document. However, we
have no adequate way of specifying the behavior of most programs.
The only meaningful specification of a program’s behavior is implicit
in its interaction with its underlying software/hardware environ-
ment; that is, programs are self-describing, but only when they run.
The only way to tell what a program really does is to run it.
Alternatively, it might be argued that most application programs
run under an operating system (though some may run on a “bare”
machine), so we might emulate the behavior of the OS to provide a
virtual platform for all applications that run under that OS. This
would provide even greater leverage than would emulating applica-
tions, since many different applications run on a given OS. (Al-
though some applications run on several different operating systems,
there are many more application programs than there are operating
systems.) Emulating an OS would avoid having to emulate all the
applications that run on it. However, it is at least as difficult to emu-
late the behavior of an OS as it is to emulate the behavior of an appli-
cation program; in fact, it is probably more difficult, since an OS in-
teracts with every aspect of the computing environment, whereas
most applications are far more constrained. So the argument against
emulating an application applies a fortiori against emulating an OS.
Nevertheless, I do not rule out this possibility: in some cases, it may
be preferable to emulate a hardware platform along with an OS to
produce a virtual hardware/software platform that can run applica-
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 23

tion programs. The approach proposed here allows for this variation,
though it assumes that emulating hardware platforms will usually
make the most sense.
Emulating the underlying hardware platform appears to be the
best approach, given the current state of the art. We do not have ac-
curate, explicit specifications of software, but we do (and must) have
such specifications for hardware: if we did not, we could not build
hardware devices in the first place. Why is it that we can specify
hardware but not software? Any specification is intended for some
reader or interpreter. Application software is intended to be inter-
preted automatically by hardware to produce an ephemeral, virtual
entity (the running application) whose behavior we do not require to
be fully specified (except to the hardware that will run it), since it is
intended to be used interactively by humans who can glean its be-
havior as they use it. On the other hand, a hardware specification is
interpreted (whether by humans or software) to produce a physical
entity (a computer) whose behavior must be well-specified, since we
expect to use it as a building block in other hardware and software
systems. Hardware specifications are by necessity far more rigorous
and meaningful than those of software. Emulating hardware is there-
fore entirely feasible and is in fact done routinely. 7
Hardware emulation is also relatively easy to validate: when
programs intended for a given computer run successfully on an em-
ulator of that computer, this provides reasonable assurance that the
emulation is correct. Test suites of programs could be developed spe-
cifically for the purpose of validation, and an emulator specification
could be tested by generating emulators for a range of different exist-
ing computers and by running the test suite on each emulator. A test
suite of this kind could also be saved as part of the emulator specifi-
cation and its documentation, allowing an emulator generated for a
future computer to be validated (in the future, before being used) by
running the saved test suite. In addition, the computer museum ap-
proach dismissed above might be used to verify future emulators by
comparing their behavior with that of saved, obsolete machines.
Furthermore, of the potential emulation approaches discussed
here, emulating hardware has the greatest leverage. Except for spe-
cial-purpose embedded processors (such as those in toasters, auto-
mobiles, watches, and other products), computers are rarely built to
run a single program: there are generally many more programs than
hardware platforms, even though some programs may run on more
than one platform. At any given moment, there are relatively few
hardware platforms in existence, though new hardware platforms

7 It is not yet clear whether digital preservation needs to include the retention of
attributes of the original medium on which a digital document was stored. It can
be argued that digital documents are (or should be) logically independent of their
storage media and therefore need not preserve the behavior of these media;
however, a counterargument to this might be that since some digital documents
are tailored to specific media (such as CD-ROM), they should retain at least some
attributes of those media (such as speed). The approach described here is neutral
with respect to this issue: it allows attributes of storage media to be emulated
when desired but does not require them to be.
24 Avoiding Technological Quicksand

may appear with greater frequency than new operating systems or

applications (unless we consider each version of an OS to be a differ-
ent instance, which it really is). Emulating hardware obviates the
need to emulate the behavior of operating systems, application pro-
grams, and individual digital documents, all of which are problemat-
ic; it therefore appears to be by far the most efficient as well as the
most viable emulation approach.
Finally, hardware emulation is a well-understood, common tech-
nique. It has been used for decades, both to help design new hard-
ware and to provide upward compatibility for users.

8.5 Natural experiments related to the

emulation approach

Two classes of natural experiments suggest that the emulation ap-

proach described here should work. Though none of these experi-
ments addresses all of the questions that must be answered in order
to use emulation as a basis for digital preservation, they show that
key pieces of the strategy have worked in the past.
The first class consists of examples of bundling digital docu-
ments with their original software to ensure that they are accessible
and readable. For example, Apple Macintosh software is often dis-
tributed with a README file that describes the software, explains
how to install it, and gives other information such as restrictions on
use and information about bugs. (This is also an example of encapsu-
lating explanatory annotation with software.) In order to ensure that
the README file will be readable by any user, distribution disks
typically include a copy of a simple text-editing program (Simple-
Text) that can display the README file. Though most users already
have at least one copy of SimpleText on their systems, as well as oth-
er, more powerful editors, most software vendors prefer not to as-
sume that this will be the case. In the emulation approach, digital
documents would be bundled with their original software, just as the
README file is bundled with software capable of reading it in this
example.
A second example of bundling occurs in the PC world, involving
the compression scheme called PKZIP. When a file is compressed us-
ing this software, a decompression program, such as PKUNZIP, is
required to expand the file. However, an option in PKZIP allows a
simple version of an unzip program to be bundled with each com-
pressed file. Choosing this option creates an executable file which,
when run, expands automatically to the original file, avoiding the
issue of whether the recipient of a compressed file will have the ap-
propriate decompression software on hand.
A final example is a collection of images distributed on the Plan-
etary Data Systems CD-ROM from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laborato-
ry (JPL). The imagery on this CD is designed to be read with Adobe
Reader 2, a free program that can display files encoded in Adobe’s
popular portable document format (PDF). If the user tries to display
these images with a later version of Adobe Reader, the images refuse
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 25

to display themselves: not only are the images bundled with appro-
priate software, but they are protected from being accessed by any
other software, since there is no guarantee that such software will
treat the images appropriately. In this case, not even later versions of
the same program (such as Adobe Reader 3) are allowed to read the
images; though this may seem restrictive, it is in fact a good ap-
proach, since later versions of software do not always treat files cre-
ated by older versions appropriately.
All of these examples bundle software to be run on a known
platform, so none of them provides much longevity for their docu-
ments. Nevertheless they do prove that bundling original software
with a document is an effective way of making sure that the docu-
ment can be read.
The second class of natural experiments involves the use of emu-
lation to add longevity to programs and their documents. The first
example is a decades-old practice that hardware vendors have used
to provide upward compatibility for their customers. Forcing users
to rewrite all of their application software (and its attendant databas-
es, documents, and other files) when switching to a new computer
would make it hard for vendors to sell new machines. Many vendors
(in particular, IBM) have therefore often supplied emulation modes
for older machines in their new machines. The IBM 360, for example,
included an emulation mode for the older 7090/94 so that old pro-
grams could still be run. Apple did something similar when switch-
ing from the Motorola 68000 processor series to the PowerPC by in-
cluding an emulator for 68000 code; not only did this allow users to
run all of their old programs on the new machine, but significant
pieces of the Macintosh operating system itself were also run under
emulation after the switch, to avoid having to rewrite them. Whether
emulation is provided by a special mode using microcode or by a
separate application program, such examples prove that emulation
can be used to keep programs (and their documents) usable long af-
ter they would otherwise have become obsolete.
A second example of the use of emulation is in designing new
computing platforms. Emulation has long been used as a way of re-
fining new hardware designs, testing and evaluating them, and even
beginning to develop software for them before they have been built.
Emulators of this kind might be a first step toward producing the
emulator specifications needed for the approach proposed here:
hardware vendors might be induced to turn their hardware-design
emulators into products that could satisfy the emulator scheme’s
need for emulator specifications.
A final example of the use of emulation is in the highly active
“retro-computing” community, whose members delight in creating
emulators for obsolete video game platforms and other old comput-
ers. There are numerous World Wide Web sites listing hundreds of
free emulators of this kind that have been written to allow old pro-
grams to be run on modern computers. A particularly interesting ex-
ample of this phenomenon is the MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine
Emulator) system, which supports emulation of a large number of
26 Avoiding Technological Quicksand

different platforms, suggesting that emulation can be cost-effective

for a wide range of uses.
These three examples consist of emulators that run on existing
hardware platforms, so they do not address the problem of specify-
ing an emulator for a future, unknown computer; but they prove that
emulation is an effective way of running otherwise obsolete software.

9. Research In order to prove the feasibility of the emulation approach, research

is required in three areas: (1) techniques must be developed for speci-
Required for the
fying emulators that will run on unknown, future computers;
Emulation (2) techniques must be developed for keeping annotations and expla-
Approach nations human-readable in the future; and (3) techniques must be
developed for encapsulating documents, software, emulator specifi-
cations, and associated annotations and metadata to ensure their mu-
tual cohesion and prevent their corruption.

9.1 Emulator specification formalism

An emulator specification formalism must be developed that cap-

tures all relevant attributes of a hardware platform, including inter-
action modes, speed (of execution, display, access, and so forth), dis-
play attributes (pixel size and shape, color, dimensionality, and so
forth), time and calendar representations, device and peripheral
characteristics, distribution and networking features, multiuser as-
pects, version and configuration information, and other attributes.
The formalism must be extensible so that future attributes can be
added when needed (for example, for compliance with future Y10K
standards). The set of attributes needed to ensure that a future emu-
lation precisely reproduces an obsolete platform in all possible as-
pects is unbounded, but the scheme assumes that a certain degree of
variance in the behavior of emulators will be acceptable. (This vari-
ance corresponds to that in the original program’s behavior when
executed on different contemporary systems and configurations, us-
ing different monitors, keyboards, disk drives, and other peripheral
devices.)
Emulator specifications must be saved so that they can be used
effectively to produce emulators in the future. There are several pos-
sible ways of doing this. First, an abstract, formal description could
be saved, which could be interpreted by a human or program in the
future to enable construction of the desired emulator. Second, an exe-
cutable description (that is, an emulator program written in a high-
level language) could be saved, which would be designed to run on
some simple abstract machine that could easily be implemented in
the future; instructions for implementing that abstract machine and/
or an abstract formal description of it would be saved along with the
emulator to allow it to run on future computers. Alternatively, the
second approach could be transformed into an instance of the first by
making the executable description abstract and formal, thereby al-
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 27

lowing it either to be interpreted by a human or program in the fu-

ture or to be run on a future implementation of an abstract machine.
All of these alternatives require storing formal and/or explanatory
descriptions that can be used to bootstrap the process of creating a
future emulator. To ensure that these descriptions remain human-
readable in the future, they must be stored in the annotation form
discussed next.

9.2 Human-readable annotations and

explanations

Ideally, the emulation scheme would be self-describing: that is, a

suitable program running on a future computer, when asked to ac-
cess an obsolete document saved using this scheme, would automat-
ically interpret the saved explanations to find out how to open the
encapsulation, generate the required emulator (or find one that has
already been generated for this type of computer), and run the docu-
ment’s saved software under this emulator to access the document
itself. Alternatively, a user could interpret the saved explanations to
perform the same steps. In either case, the key to successfully access-
ing a document saved using the emulation approach lies in the saved
explanations that accompany the document, including explanations
of how to use the encapsulation itself, user documentation, version
and configuration information for all the software that is to be run
under emulation (and for the emulated hardware), and the emulator
specification itself. Whether or not these saved explanations can be
automatically interpreted by future computer programs, they must
remain readable by future humans, to ensure that saved documents
are not lost.
The emulation approach requires the development of an annota-
tion scheme that can save these explanations in a form that will re-
main human-readable, along with metadata which provide the his-
torical, evidential, and administrative context for preserving digital
documents. There has been considerable work in the library, ar-
chives, scientific data, and records communities on identifying such
metadata (Cox 1994 and 1996, IEEE 1997, NRC 1995, Rothenberg 1996).
Future users of digital documents preserved using the emulation
approach will be faced with an encapsulated collection of compo-
nents that need to be used in a particular way in order to read the
desired document. First and foremost, users must be able to read
some intelligible explanation that tells them how to proceed. This
explanation must itself be a digital document (if only to guarantee
that it accompanies the other components of the encapsulation), but
it must be human-readable if it is to serve its purpose. It will general-
ly be of the same vintage as the encapsulated digital document
whose exhumation it explains, but it cannot be stored in the same
way as that document, or it will be equally unreadable. The solution
to this conundrum lies in restricting the form of this explanatory
documentation, for example, to simple text (or possibly text plus
simple line drawings).
28 Avoiding Technological Quicksand

Even if the encoding of this explanatory material is standard-

ized, however, whatever standard is chosen will eventually become
obsolete, which is why the emulation strategy allows annotations
and explanations to be translated (transliterated) whenever neces-
sary. In order to guarantee that this translation is performed without
loss, we must develop subset-translatable encodings, which I define
as having the property that if some encoding Y is subset-translatable
into another encoding Z, then anything expressed in Y can be trans-
lated into a subset Zy of Z, and anything in the resulting subset Zy
can be translated back into Y without loss. This allows Z to be a
proper superset of Y (not limited to Y’s expressivity) while ensuring
that anything that is expressed in Y can be translated into Z and back
into Y again without loss. A sequence of such encodings, evolving as
necessary over time, will solve the readability problem for annota-
tions: each encoding in this sequence serves as an annotation stan-
dard during a given epoch.
Although it is logically sufficient—having asserted that an en-
coding Y is subset-translatable into encoding Z—to translate a docu-
ment from Y to Z and discard the original Y-form of the document,
this is unlikely to convince skeptical future users. It is therefore also
important to develop the concept of a subset-translator (consisting in
each case of a table or a process, depending on the complexity of the
translation) that shows how to translate Y into Z and back again. If
this translator is saved, along with definitions of encodings Y and Z,
and the Y and Z forms of all translated information, then any future
user can verify that Y is indeed subset-translatable into Z, that the
information was correctly translated from Y to Z, and that nothing
was lost in this translation (by verifying that the reverse translation
reproduces the original, saved Y-form of the information).8 In order
for all of this saved information (encodings, translators, history of
translations that have been performed, and so forth) to remain read-
able in the future, it must be stored using this same transliteration
scheme, that is, it must be encoded in a current annotation standard,
to be subset-translated as needed in the future.

9.3 Encapsulation techniques

One final piece of the puzzle is required to make the emulation ap-
proach work: how do we encapsulate all of the required items so that
they do not become separated or corrupted and so that they can be
handled as a single unit for purposes of data management, copying
to new media, and the like? While encapsulation is one of the core
concepts of computer science, the term carries a misleading connota-
tion of safety and permanence in the current context. An encapsula-
tion is, after all, nothing more than a logical grouping of items. For
example, whether these are stored contiguously depends on the de-

8 Although a sequence of such translations may be needed over time, all that is
really required is to save the sequence of encodings and translators: future
custodians of this explanatory information could then safely defer translating a
particular annotation until it is needed, so long as its encoding is not lost.
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 29

tails of the storage medium in use at any given time. The logical shell
implied by the term encapsulation has no physical reality (unless it is
implemented as a hardened physical storage device). And while it is
easy to mark certain bit streams as inviolate, it may be impossible to
prevent them from being corrupted in the face of arbitrary digital
manipulation, copying, and transformation.
Techniques must therefore be developed for protecting encapsu-
lated documents and detecting and reporting (or correcting) any vio-
lations of their encapsulation. In addition, criteria must be defined
for the explanatory information that must be visible outside an encap-
sulation to allow the encapsulation to be interpreted properly.
Many encapsulated digital documents from a given epoch will
logically contain common items, including emulator specifications
for common hardware platforms, common operating system and ap-
plication code files, software and hardware documentation, and
specifications of common annotation standards and their translators.
Physically copying all of these common elements into each encapsu-
lation would be highly redundant and wasteful of storage. If trust-
worthy repositories for such items can be established (by libraries,
archives, government agencies, commercial consortia, or other orga-
nizations), then each encapsulation could simply contain a pointer to
the required item (or its name and identifying information, along
with a list of alternative places where it might be found). Different
alternatives for storing common items may appeal to different insti-
tutions in different situations, so a range of such alternatives should
be identified and analyzed.
There is also the question of what should go inside an encapsula-
tion versus what should be presented at its surface to allow it to be
manipulated effectively and efficiently. In principle, the surface of an
encapsulation should present indexing and cataloging information to
aid in storing and finding the encapsulated document, a description
of the form and content of the encapsulated document and its associ-
ated items to allow the encapsulation to be opened, contextual and
historical information to help a potential user (or document manag-
er) evaluate the relevance and validity of the document, and man-
agement information to help track usage and facilitate retention and
other management decisions. All of this information should be read-
able without opening the encapsulation, since none of it actually re-
quires reading the encapsulated document itself.
It is logically necessary only that the tip of this information pro-
trude through the encapsulation: there must be some explanatory
annotation on the surface that tells a reader how to open at least
enough of the encapsulation to access further explanatory informa-
tion inside the encapsulation. Even this surface annotation will gen-
erally not be immediately human-readable, if the encapsulation is
stored digitally. If it happens to be stored on a physical medium that
is easily accessible by humans (such as a disk), then this surface an-
notation might be rendered as a human-readable label on the physi-
cal exterior of the storage unit, but this may not be feasible. For ex-
ample, if a large number of encapsulations are stored on a single
30 Avoiding Technological Quicksand

unit, it may be impossible to squeeze all of their surface annotations

onto the label of the unit. So in general, even this surface annotation
will be on a purely logical surface that has no physical correlate. The
reader of this surface annotation will therefore be a program rather
than a human, though it may quickly deliver what it reads to a hu-
man. It must therefore be decided how such surface annotations
should be encoded, for example, whether the annotation standards
described above are sufficient for this purpose or whether a hierar-
chy of such standards—corresponding to different levels of immedi-
ate human-readability—should be developed.

10. Summary The long-term digital preservation problem calls for a long-lived so-
lution that does not require continual heroic effort or repeated inven-
tion of new approaches every time formats, software or hardware
paradigms, document types, or recordkeeping practices change. This
approach must be extensible, since we cannot predict future changes,
and it must not require labor-intensive translation or examination of
individual documents. It must handle current and future documents
of unknown type in a uniform way, while being capable of evolving
as necessary. Furthermore, it should allow flexible choices and
tradeoffs among priorities such as access, fidelity, and ease of docu-
ment management.
Most approaches that have been suggested as solutions to this
problem—including reliance on standards and the migration of digi-
tal material into new forms as required—suffer from serious inade-
quacies. In contrast, the emulation strategy as elaborated above,
though it requires further research and proof of feasibility, appears to
have many conceptual advantages over the other approaches sug-
gested and is offered as a promising candidate for a solution to the
problem of preserving digital material far into the future.
 Avoiding Technological Quicksand 31

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