Dr Natasa Milic-Frayling, Founder & CEO at Intact Digital and Cate Ovington, Director of The Knowlogy are featured in the SelectScience Editorial Article: Digital obsolescence: Is your research data at risk?, discussing how rapid technological innovation results in a ‘graveyard of software’ and how to mitigate digital obsolescence risks to valuable digital data. They focus on key challenges that organisations and scientific labs face due to rapid aging of software and discuss how INTACT Software Library and INTACT Digital Continuity Services help overcome these challenges.
Natasa points to advances in IT and computing as essential for safeguarding vital data: “Our expertise is in computing and IT, and we use state-of-the-art techniques to handle problems with aging technologies. We provide a solution that enables researchers to read their data for as long as they need it. It doesn't matter how old the data is, it doesn't matter how old the software is — researchers can access and process the data safely and reliably.”
Cate highlighted the regulatory concerns that organizations and labs have due to digital obsolescence. They often resort to practices that are not compliant with the ALCOA+ principles for long-term retention of data. She explains: “There is a regulatory requirement to make sure that the digital data is enduring, available, and complete for as long as it is required. For that one needs software but, as we can see, technology is moving at such a fast pace that this is a challenge for research. As a quality assurance auditor, I have not observed a long-term solution. It is great that we now have a plausible solution. With the Intact Digital approach, data is used in its original electronic form which ensures it stays dynamic and complete. People can go back and review it in the future. And it's also helpful for auditors and regulators to know that the data is still available.”
The editorial article “Digital obsolescence: Is your research data at risk?” is available on the SelectScience portal.
