Comments on DSHR's Blog: Migrating Microsoft Formats

Hi David, I'd just like to say how much I app...

2010-12-30T18:40:25.868-08:00

Hi David,

I'd just like to say how much I appreciate you're explanation of this problem. It gives great examples of some of the issues I have been raising for a while. I'm sure I will be using this post in future discussions.

Thanks,

Euan Cochrane

In general I agree with bibwild, making the best b...

2010-12-29T18:30:41.121-08:00

In general I agree with bibwild, making the best be the enemy of the good is far too prevalent in digital preservation.

But in this particular case, I don't. Lets assume that there is a format into which current Microsoft software can save documents which some other software can open without losing any significant aspect of "preserv[ing] access to the content". For the sake of argument, lets assume that this format is OpenXML without the Microsoft-specific extensions. In other words, the way Novell's Open Office would open the document. Then users defecting to Open Office face no significant degradation of their user experience, and Microsoft's strategy has failed.

Microsoft has to ensure that the parts of the user's experience encoded in the Microsoft-specific extensions, the parts that are lost in format migration, are significant enough to cause degradation sufficient to ensure that the vast majority of users continue to pay the upgrade costs. Thus it is likely that these parts of the user's experience are things we want to preserve even though in general we are not committed to preserving total fidelity to the original reader's experience.

Are there really people who advocate "reprodu...

2010-12-29T15:31:01.461-08:00

Are there really people who advocate "reproducing the user's experience of the original content" as a goal, or is that a straw man? Or wait, is that in fact the goal you are suggesting is the proper one?

I don't know, this isn't my area, I'm just a casual observer.

But it seems to me you can take that to extremes of fidelity of reproduction of "experience" that make it impossible for it ever to be accomplished -- and also entirely unneccesary and serving nobody's needs, indeed.

[If you want to see this old document originally written on a C64, we'll ONLY let you see it on a C64. In fact, migrating formats is intended (regardless of whether its' a good strategy) to AVOID the need for just that, not to guarantee it, right? It's your alternate strategy of always keeping machines, OSs, and application softwares around to read the original files that seems like it's intending to allow a "reproduction of the original user's experience", right?

Or to take matters to a ridiculous extreme, if you want to read Dickens, I'm sorry we'll only let you read it one chapter per week, and only incorporated in this magazine it was serialized in, and we will provide a horse-drawn carriage to transport you to our offices, that we maintain in order to ensure the reproducibility of the original user's experience.]

But the real goal is probably more like "preserve access to the content, as close to how it was originally intended by the author as possible." (That is, focusing on fidelity of the content, not of the historical "user's experience").

It still may very well be that trying to migrate preserved documents is not a good way to do that (too likely to fail, too expensive, there are other cheaper ways to do it, etc.) But arguing about whether "reproducing the user's experience of the original content" is possible seems beside the point to me.