Emulators and Standards; Multimedia Policy Manuals

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Robert Spindler
Fri, 20 Feb 1998 08:56:19 -0700

One way to make it easier for the development of emulators would be to
establish operating system, encoding and metadata standards that
creators could choose to apply for information they believe will be of
archival or long term value. This would at least cut down on the total
number of emulators that would need to be written and provide the
metadata to write them...I think the controversial part of this is
whether creators should choose to apply standards or whether creators
should be required to implement them for certain kinds of records or
products. I think this is a likely extension of current records
management concepts for organizational and particularly government
records. The application of standards in the cultural resources arena
might have to be voluntary since these are probably private property
items in many cases. The "aggressive rescue function" cited in the RLG
Task Force Report on Digital Preservation was one of the really
interesting recommendations presented that raises the classic
unregulated creativity vs. necessary regulation debate that rages so
often here in Arizona and elsewhere!

Here at my institution this debate is just beginning as we implement
"born multimedia" policy manuals. The initial idea was to create
electronic only policy manuals and I spent some time trying to establish
procedure limitations such as W3C html "standard" compliance and
avoidance of proprietary encoding. This whole effort was circumvented by
public records requirements for permanent media - Since the state has
not yet approved electronic permanent media we had to resort to printing
hardcopy of the web site as the "copy of record". Clearly the hardcopy
doesn't contain all the presentational aspects of the policy site, but
through this decision we're saying that it is the text of the policy
that is the record, and the graphical nature of the web site is merely
presentation or artistic amplification. The good news about this is it
frees our markup people to use whatever encoding they choose, but it
remains to be seen whether the graphical presentations could become
litigious components of the record. I believe that the legal precedents
in this area won't be established for some time to come given the time
it took for precedents to be established in the document imaging
arena....Meanwhile I've drafted an actual records retention schedule
that will soon be sent to the state for approval that enunciates all
this...

An interesting case study for a rainy Friday morning in the desert!

Rob Spindler, Head
Dept. of Archives and Manuscripts
Arizona State University Libraries, Box 871006 Tempe, AZ 85287

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jaron Lanier
> Sent: Thursday, February 19, 1998 8:01 PM
>
> Subject: RE: ditto, intelligent archivists
>
> And if you can answer that question deeply, you'll be the computer
> scientist of the century. If only it were easy in practice.
>
> At 9:37 PM -0500 2/19/98, Stewart Brand wrote:
> >At 3:25 PM -0500 2/19/98, Ed Earle wrote:
> >>Perhaps emulator research will
> >>have to be a part of the data archiving process?
> >
> >Oh yes.
> >
> >And a good question to raise sooner rather than later is:
> >
> > How might software be better written and platforms better
> designed
> >so as to make it easier for later emulators?
>
>
> *************************************
> Please note my current net home:
>
>
>
> web: www.advanced.org/jaron
>

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