University of Portsmouth (02/11/09)
The University of Portsmouth’s Keeping Emulation Environments Portable (KEEP) project is working to record and preserve the massive amounts of digital technology and cultural information that is rapidly disappearing. The KEEP project is developing methods of safeguarding digital objects such as text, sound and image files, multimedia documents, Web sites, databases, and video games. Part of the project will include building software that can recognize and open all previous types of computer files. Other emulators exist for certain platforms and types of media, but the new emulator will be able to work with media in any format. “Every digital file risks being either lost by degrading or by the technology used to ‘read’ it disappearing altogether,” says Janet Delve, a computer historian at the University of Portsmouth. “Former generations have left a rich supply of books, letters, and documents which tell us who they were, how they lived, and what they discovered. There’s a very real risk that we could bequeath a blank spot in history.” The project plans to protect software for the future so that every piece of data and software created can be encoded to be read by future devices. Britain’s National Archive already holds the equivalent of 580,000 encyclopedias of information in file formats that are no longer commercially available, and the British Library reports that Europe loses 2.7 billion British pounds each year in business value due to problems preserving and accessing old digital files.
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