Towards Preserving Digital Culture: An interview with Paul Wheatley

Towards Preserving Digital Culture series is a contribution to the Software Heritage initiative, supported by INRIA and UNESCO. The primary objective of this series is to underscore the pivotal role of software heritage preservation in mitigating the loss of digital cultural heritage. Through these interviews, we present diverse perspectives to foster discussions on challenges related to technological progress, obsolescence, legal limitations, and preservation complexities, contributing to addressing current field needs.

Hello Paul! Thanks for joining this series! Before we start, could you tell us more about yourself?

Hello! I’m Paul Wheatley and I’m the Head of Research and Practice at the Digital Preservation Coalition. The DPC is an international charity that supports organizations around the world in sustaining their data for the long term. As well as working collaboratively to enhance our digital preservation capabilities I work closely with our organizational members around the world to solve their sustainability challenges.

I first worked in this field back in the late 90s on a research and development project called CAMiLEON. It was one of the first explorations of the use of emulation to preserve digital information, including software. At that time there was a great deal of scepticism about emulation and in particular it’s use in the heritage sector. We developed a solution to preserve the iconic BBC Domesday system as a demonstrator of the approaches we had developed and the value of software preservation. BBC Domesday was one of the first multimedia systems and it pushed 8-bit technology to its limits. Despite being truly groundbreaking it quickly became obsolete. Our work showed how preservation of the software driving the system was critical in ensuring the survival of the artifact as a whole. It was exciting to work on such an important milestone of computing history.

What are the main benefits of software preservation?

As a computer scientist and a fan of software going back to the home computing revolution of the 1980s, I’m well aware of the value of software as heritage artifacts in themselves. The broader IT revolution is surely the great technology story of our times, so we really should be doing more to preserve that history for future generations. In my current work at the DPC, software preservation is increasingly being applied to preserve information — with the software itself being just important one link in the rendering stack that gets you to the information content of the data. It’s often the best, and sometimes only way, of preserving access to obsolete data. As data and software becomes more intertwined I think software preservation techniques will becoming increasingly important.

What are the challenges and/or obstacles?

One of the major challenges can be found in the somewhat oppressive intellectual property laws found around the world. Copyright owners of course need to be able to protect their interests and ability to generate income from their data. But this shouldn’t be at the expense of preservation efforts which can deliver public good without impacting on revenue streams. Why do we have fair use exceptions in the USA but not in the rest of the world? This is a challenging area to influence but it’s something the DPC is beginning to look at with a new initiative that we’re calling the Fair Play Task Force. We want to demonstrate how current IPR law is unnecessarily restricting preservation, to the extent that even National Libraries are unable to fulfil their mandate to sustain our digital heritage. We certainly won’t solve the problem overnight but hopefully we can generate the evidence to support progressive IP review, when opportunities arise in jurisdictions around the world.

What would be your advice on collectively moving forward on software preservation?

We have to be in it for the long haul and we must work together. Collaboration is at the heart of what we do in the DPC as the broader preservation challenges are simply too complex and multi-faceted for any single organization to solve on its own. The specifics of Software preservation are no different. We need to coordinate efforts and keep chipping away at the obstacles. And we need to keep raising awareness of the need for preservation and the huge public good it can deliver. I’m a big fan of Software Heritage’s work in this area and I hope its efforts will continue to be supported around the world.

Could you recommend us with a blog, article or publication that you particularly appreciated?

I often think back to the very first article I read when I began my career in this sector, which was recommended to me by Dr David Holdsworth — a computer scientist I was fortunate to work with and who set me on course for a career in this fascinating field. The paper can be found in the Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society and it’s written by Doron Swade. He talks about what it really means to preserve software from his perspective as a curator at the Science Museum in London, way back in 1993. Reading it was certainly a light bulb moment for me in relation to software preservation. Sadly the museum sector just hasn’t been funded well enough to take a lead in digital preservation over the last few decades, but it’s great to see museums focusing more on this area in recent times. DPC has a really active museums working group which is great as I think we all have a lot to learn from working with our museum based colleagues.

Thank you, Paul, for joining this project!