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Digital legacy: Respecting the digital dead

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John, like many other archivists, hopes that standards will emerge that will make it comparatively easy to navigate, preserve and curate a digital bequest. In the past couple of years, this has gone from a theoretical to a practical concern, with John's eMSS lab sharing a floor with the library's digital preservation team and the Open Planets Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to developing workaday digital archiving tools.

What might those look like? A promising two-pronged approach, says John, is to develop file formats and software that cater to the particular needs of archiving and preservation and can be run on "universal virtual machines". That would allow digital disc images, like that of Hamilton's Macintosh, to be booted up without being tied to any particular platform. The virtual machine can be repeatedly "ported" to newer machines, ensuring the files will remain accessible even as the original hardware becomes obsolete or unusable.

If all of that works, a researcher at the British Library may one day experience the spooky sensation of poking around my desktop long after I am gone. And perhaps yours too.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury is the editor of newscientist.com

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It's what's inside that counts (Image: Rex Features)

It's what's inside that counts (Image: Rex Features)

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