Stuart Lee and I wrote an article that touched on this a little in Gail Owen's book on Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts. And I had a couple of brief columns on different aspects of the problem Heroic Age a little while back.
I'm not 100% sure I share your premises, BTW. I think most things from 1995 would still be recoverable, if you knew the right software. I recently helped a colleague restore a whole bunch of very old WordPerfect files using Open Office. And while I've not tried a 1995 .doc file in it, I'd be amazed if it couldn't read it.
My rule of thumb is anything for a PC or Mac is recoverable, no matter how old, unless it is in a minor proprietary format. So most image files, most WordPerfect and Word files, I'm guessing most Wordstar files should be fine. I'd have my doubts about ChiWriter files, though that might have been a pre-PC program for the SuperPet. As a rule, you're better off in recovery with something like OpenOffice, since the stakes surrounding compatibility are much higher for them than for proprietary software like Word: people use Word whether or not it reads other formats, but nobody would use OpenOffice if it didn't read Word. In face in the case of old .doc files, Open Office was a better interpreter than Word: when I was typesetting Caedmon's Hymn, which I did in Word from SGML masters, I had some trouble where Word would get confused in displaying complex tables. Opening the files in OO and then saving them immediately as Word Files again was usually enough to solve the problem.
It is useful to read Nicholas Barker on preservation anxiety, BTW. I think a lot of what he says about misplaced fears of obsolescence with regard to 19th Century paper is also true of things like CD-ROMs and file formats. You'd be amazed how much works just fine.
-dan
On 10-07-28 05:12 PM, Daniel Mondekar wrote:
Dear Digital Medievalists and TEI members,
I have a question about preservation of digital content especially medieval manuscripts. I am writing a small article on the topic and I have consulted a lot sources (papers, handbooks) but most of them do not say anything about the “life span” of the data in specific formats. To clarify this – a .doc file crated in 1995. Will be most likely unreadable in 2010. What about other formats? Has anyone done some research on “life span” of a specific version of digital formats and when it becomes clear that the new version and the old one are not compatible anymore? And here I am talking about pdf, rtf, doc (and all office files), djvu, tiff, jpg , mpg etc. (texts and images especially)
In my work I am also making a small remark on XML as a data container since it is, in my opinion, the best way to go and the standard will surely be around for years. But what kind of steps do you make to ensure the preservation of documents that have been encoded in xml
I would also like to hear if there are opposing views on xml.
I also have the same question about the media. I found some research about the longevity of CDs and DVDs but I am also interested in other media like older hard disks, zip drives and magnetic media.
I am sorry to bother you with this, but I can use any help I can get
Thank you in advance
Daniel Mondekar
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