Long term digital preservation - An end user’s perspective

The issue of long term preservation of digital data has, in recent years, become a critical issue with many diverse groups and organisations recognising the need to preserve digital documents before they fall victim to digital obsolescence. However, there is a distinct lack of discussion regarding the needs of future end users of such preserved documents. This is surprising, given that it is the end user who ultimately determines what information should be archived and in what way. Furthermore, it is essential that a preserved document retains its authenticity and usability through time and is easily interpreted by future end users. To this extent, we present in this paper details of our case study: an emulation framework to preserve 2D and 3D anthropometric data. We describe the testing of this emulation environment, by anthropometric experts, against the original environment and compare the two based on a given set of usability and authenticity criteria.