Industrial Philology: Problems and techniques of data and archives preservation for future generations

The main objective of digital archiving of texts is their re-use and preservation. The concept that guides these initiatives is linked to structural and organizational needs which heavily influence the definition of the format specifications that describe the organisation of the archives at various levels and consists of a more or less complex document. A format specification provides the details needed to build a file from a text, establishes the admitted encodings and software applications that can decode the file and make its content accessible. These structural specifications can have an extremely variable size and they depend on the complexity of the format. Although some format specifications are, for the most part, independent of the specific software (for example, ASCII and Unicode codes), many of them are related to the historical period in which the texts were acquired and also by dated software technologies. The file format specification should evolve hand in hand with the related software, and the fate of one is in fact often linked to that of the other. It is therefore appropriate to face the issue of obsolescence of software together with the obsolescence of file formats and of storage medium.