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6.1 What characteristics should be preserved?

The most critical issue when selecting a long-term preservation format is to decide what characteristics of the record need to be preserved.

At PROV, it was decided that the most critical characteristic to preserve was the appearance of the record. The preserved record should be as close as possible in appearance to what the original creator of the record saw. This means, for example, that:

• text should retain its font, weight, and colour. For example, a warning in bright red 40 point text should not be displayed in 12 point black characters when the record is viewed.
• objects such as images and text should not move from page to page depending on the idiosyncracies of the layout algorithms. For example, an image should be associated with its caption and not be arbitrarily relocated to another page.
• information not originally displayed should not be subsequently displayed. For example, when the record of an email is displayed, it should show the email as the original user saw it. The record should not show email headers that were not displayed to the original user (although these would be recorded in the record).

Accurately rendering record content is a key advantage of PDF, for example, over XML representations of documents. PDF precisely and accurately describes each page in a document. XML, on the other hand, describes the logical structure of the document. While stylesheets make it possible to indicate the desired appearance of an XML document, it is not possible to guarantee accuracy of rendition, for two reasons:

• there is no requirement for browsers to accurately apply the style specified in a stylesheet.
• the appearance of the pages depends on the layout algorithms used by the browser. Different algorithms, for example, could result in text being moved between pages.

Other organisations could make different decisions about the essential characteristics of a record that must be preserved. For example, it could be decided that it is only necessary to preserve the information in the record and a sense of the original appearance. In this case an XML representation might be appropriate. Other organisations, on the other hand, could feel that it is necessary to preserve the look and feel of the original application that created the document (this is particularly true where museums wish to preserve software as artefacts).

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