Public Record Office Victoria (PROV) has revamped the list of long term preservation formats it will accept. In this article Andrew Waugh explain why the list was changed and what it means for Victorian agencies.

I have recently had experience of the pointy end of format obsolescence. Some of the software I use to produce a society journal was purchased 16 years ago and will not run under a modern operating system. I had consequently been putting off upgrading my computer, but this was now becoming a significant security risk. Fortunately, I was able to obtain modern software that could deal with some of the formats, and I did not completely lose the remainder of the information as I was able to roughly extract it. But it was close, and I needed to invest a considerable amount of resources in rescuing my information.

My experience illustrates the challenges of format obsolescence for organisations. Formats are proving more robust than we feared a decade ago – old formats have not been replaced as quickly as we thought and new software continues to read old formats. But format failure is still real – how many organisations would have spent the effort necessary to rescue information from a dying format?

The VERS approach to format obsolescence

Format obsolescence was addressed in the original Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS) using migration. Record content that was to be preserved for a long time had to be migrated (converted) into an approved Long Term Preservation Format (LTPF). This approach is also taken by many other preservation organisations, including NARA (US), the National Archives (UK), and the NAA (Australia). The renewed VERS standard continues to use migration to deal with format obsolescence.

The key weakness of the migration approach is in the cost of migration into the LTPF and the risk of information loss due to migration failure. It is necessary to source a migration tool, conduct tests to ensure that the migration is accurate, actually perform the migration, and finally test the migrated content. Done properly, migration is expensive. One of the goals of renewing the VERS standard was to reduce this migration cost.

A changed approach in the renewed VERS standard

The key change in the renewed VERS standard is that we now consider markets and economics when considering the viability of a format. We realised that a format that dominates its market segment, and in which there is a need to access a huge pool of created information, is unlikely to become obsolete. This is because any new product in that market segment will need to accurately support the dominant format. If it does not, the product will struggle to gain users. Even if a dominant format does, eventually, become obsolete the huge pool of legacy information will mean there is a market for access and conversion software.

Examples of the formats now accepted as LTPFs under the renewed VERS standard are some of the Microsoft Office formats: Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Another example is the MP3 audio format.

The major benefit of this change is a very substantial reduction in the need to migrate record content. In a recent transfer, for example, 54% of the record content was of these Word formats. (Of the remainder, 25% were HTML and 17% were PDF. Only 4% other formats.) This represents a substantial saving in costs to an agency.

Other added formats

In addition to adding these dominant formats to the list of approved LTPF, PROV has also added a number of formats to cover types of information not previously covered by VERS. These include:

• HTML/XML for web information
• WARC for web archives
• CSV for tabular formats
• EML for email

Using the new formats in a transfer

Agencies can use these new LTPF when transferring records using the old version of VERS (PROS 99/007) as PROV has added these formats to that standard. In the example transfer mentioned earlier, 96% of the records in the transfer do not need to be migrated.

The revised list of LTPFs accepted by PROV will substantially reduce the cost of transferring records to PROV while, we believe, not affect the viability of the preserved objects.

For more information about VERS visit prov.vic.gov.au/government/vers