Methods of textual archives preservation
Authors: Eva Sassolini, Sebastiana Cucurullo, Manuela Sassi (CNR-ILC, 2014)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
Over its fifty-years of history the Institute for Computational Linguis- tics “Antonio Zampolli” (ILC) has stored a great many texts and corpora in various formats and record layouts. The consoli- dated experience in the acquisition, man- agement and analysis of texts has al- lowed us to formulate a plan of recovery and long-term digital preservation of such texts. In this paper, we describe our approach and a specific case study in which we show the results of a real at- tempt of text recovery. The most im- portant effort for us has been the study and comprehension of more or less com- plex specific data formats, almost always tied to an obsolete technology.

Introduction
The international scientific communities consider electronic resources as a central part of cultural and intellectual heritage. Many institutions are involved in international initiatives 1 directed to the preservation of digital materials. The Digital Preservation Europe project (DPE) is an example of a collaboration which involved many scientific communities at the international level, aimed at achieving the long-term preservation of resources. "Digital preservation is the active manage-ment of digital content over time to ensure ongo-ing access. Digital preservation may be applied to any form of information that is stored in a digital format. Digital preservation is necessary to ensure that the increasing quantity of digital information, created and stored by individuals and institutions, is available for current and future use. As digi-tal information is created in a variety of formats, and stored on a variety of media, it is often vulner-able to damage or loss due to environmental fac-tors, physical deterioration, or obsolescence of storage media and software applications. Digital materials may also be vulnerable to damage or loss due to malicious attack, accidental or intentional destruction, or human error. Digital preservation is an important part of a comprehensive approach to information management, and it is essential to pre-serve the authenticity, integrity, and accessibility of digital information over time. Digital preservation requires the development and implementation of policies, procedures, and technologies to ensure the long-term management of digital content. Dig-ital preservation is a complex and evolving field, and it is important to stay informed about the latest developments in order to make informed deci-sions about the management of digital content." (Verheul 2006: 11-12) "Digital preservation combines policies, strate-gies and actions that ensure access to digital con-tent over time. Digital preservation is broadly con-cerned with the discovery, acquisition, selection, appraisal, access, and long-term management of digital materials, regardless of format. Long-term management is an essential part of digital preser-vation and involves addressing issues such as changing technology, the fragility of digital media, and the need to maintain the authenticity and in-tegrity of digital information in the face of storage media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time." (ALA 2007:2) In our specific case we are engaged in looking for systems and techniques necessary for the long-term management of digital textual materi-als, stored at ILC over many years of work. At the beginning we did not know the age of all the materials. However, at a later stage, we found a number of digital materials, some of which dated as far back as the 70’s. For this reason, the work of recovery is extremely complex and demand-ing. Firstly, the format of file/text encoding was often obsolete and not associated with exhaustive documentation. Secondly, many texts contained disused linguistic annotation schemas. Conse-quently, we have adopted different strategies for “textual resource” retrieval, before focusing our attention on the application of standardized measures for conservation of the texts.

Conclusion
The preservation of that data produced with out-dated technologies should be handled especially by public institutions, as this is part of the histor-ical heritage. Therefore, it is necessary for us to complete this work, so that the resources can be reused. This will be possible only through a joint effort of the institutions involved at the regional, national and international levels. ILC is current-ly establishing a number of co-operation agree-ments like the one with the “Accademia della Crusca”, in an attempt to gather data resources for maintenance, preservation and re-use by third parties.