Conversion is NOT preservation!

Nothing is impossible...

Nothing is impossible... some things are impractical, others are simply illogical, and others yet are just expensive... but organizations need to budget for them if they make this "leap of faith".

The intent of this post wasn't to suggest an organization "DO NOTHING", but rather to ensure they take into account the required retention for information being considered for conversion, and the risks to storing it electronically because of media degradation and format instability. If the retention is regulated and there is a legal requirement to provide persistent access to the content for decades, or even for a period greater than 100 years, then sufficient steps need to be taken to ensure this happens.

When most organizations undertake a conversion project that involves scanning thousands of source documents, they don't think about the need to ensure the images that are required for longer periods of time need to be handled in a different manner than those that have a relatively short term value. Some administrative document may only have a required retention of 2 years, and a very short business value beyond that. Maintaining the ability to access these is not an issue; same is true for records that have a retention period of up to say, 10 years.

However, other images with extended retention requirements, or research value that goes out for much longer periods of time need to be handled in a substantially different manner. This can involve different steps in the original capture and storage, production of multiple sets and storing one in an environmentally safe manner to ensure longevity, or establishing a schedule for review, conversion and migration to avoid obsolescence (or degradation) of format, media, or the applications used to access them.

Domesday Project

Sorry Adrian but your facts are severely lacking. The original Domesday Book was created during the reign of William the Conqueror to find out how much England had after he had conquered it. It was created in 1086. Lets just say it was an inventory.

The Domesday Project was an attempt to create a modern digital version. It was a BBC project fo the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book. This link will take you to the website of the project.

http://atsfcouk.demonweb.co.uk/dottext/domesday.html

In 2002 the English newspaper The Observer reported "It was meant to be a showcase for Britain's electronic prowess - a computer-based, multimedia version of the Domesday Book. But 16 years after it was created, the £2.5 million BBC Domesday Project has achieved an unexpected and unwelcome status: it is now unreadable.

The special computers developed to play the 12in video discs of text, photographs, maps and archive footage of British life are - quite simply - obsolete. "
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/mar/03/research.elearning

This website documents the efforts taken to recover the information
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/tna/

Well, not exactly Adrian.

Well, not exactly Adrian. The Domesday Book that was converted dates from 1089, and that was mentioned for the purpose of indicting the viability of paper as a storage medium not requiring any conversion or migration, and providing persistent access for nearly 1000 years.

And you're right about the dates of the project, but not about there being no data losses during the project. Initial scans were stored and the media they were on degraded prior to conversion to a web-based resource, and they were required to rescan a portion of the content at that time... had they accepted the "logic" of the IT folks involved, they would have considered discarding the source materials once they were scanned. Similar advice is routinely provided now to organizations scanning records that have a required retention of 100+ years. These organizations have not budgeted to cover the costs of periodic conversion or migration of the digital images, so what happens to them?