Forever’s a long time in digital years. A broken link here, a missing drive there and history slips away. At Queensland State Archives we’re exploring how to keep Queensland history from vanishing as different hardware and software become obsolete.
Can you still open that résumé you wrote in WordPerfect in 1994?
That’s the problem with progress. As software and hardware evolve, the digital records created with older technology can quickly become inaccessible. Every update or upgrade leaves something behind – a format, a file. History.
Archivists have long fought an eternal battle against dust, pests and environmental factors to protect paper-based records. But corrupted files, ageing drives and outdated formats pose a quieter threat. Our more recent history, digital records, could be the most vulnerable.
For tens of thousands of years, the media held steady and then we went digital
Rock lasts a really long time, and are probably the most enduring medium we have used humans have used to convey information. Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples have used rock carvings and paintings to tell stories and convey a rich range of spiritual, cultural, environmental and historical information. The paintings and carvings on Quinkan Country, near Laura in northern Queensland, are just some of many thousands of culturally significant sites throughout Queensland and Australia. And yet even these ancient records, which have preserved information for tens of thousands of years, are now vulnerable due to the impacts of increased extreme weather events, industrial pollution and other factors.
Paper isn’t so rock solid, but it has proven to be remarkably hardy, and is arguably the most portable and prevalent material developed so far to capture data. Never mind Egyptian papyrus scrolls that have endured thousands of years in low-humidity, desert environments. Many of the records in QSA’s own collection speak to the relative toughness of pieces of milled plant fibres. The survival of convict records from the Moreton Bay penal settlement (1825–1842), where harsh conditions, rudimentary storage and unpredictable tropical weather were the norm, is a testament to the durability of paper.
Paper lasted centuries; but digital is forever, right?
Upgrades and updates – good for performance, tricky for preservation
Records. Phonograph players. Commodore 64s. Floppy discs. CDs. BetaMax. VHS. Flash player. WordPerfect. Atari. Compaq Deskpro 386. Lotus Notes. Windows 1.0. Windows 3.1. Windows 95. Windows XP. Windows 7. The list could go on. And on.
Digital information was meant to be different, safe from the ravages of time. Files were editable, recoverable and seemingly permanent – until the next model came out, or the latest version of the software was released. Unless you had the foresight to print it, your 1994 résumé is stuck on a floppy disk that now requires the Hewlett Packard (HP) computer you took to the tip two decades ago to read it.
Although printing out every file on your computer might seem like a sound approach to overcoming digital obsolescence, it’s not entirely practical, nor does it do much for our forests! QSA’s Digital Archives team has been working on digital preservation for many years and is working closely with national and international partners to save as much of Queensland’s digital history as we can.
Emulation: the sincerest form of digital preservation flattery
Digital preservation is the ongoing work of keeping digital information alive and usable, ensuring it remains intact, authentic and can be experienced as it was originally created, even as technology changes. It involves active management (replication, validation, migrating, maintaining and checking) so that what we create today can still be opened and understood tomorrow. One approach within this field is emulation, which focuses on recreating the original computing environments that digital records were made in. Rather than converting files into new formats, emulation lets us experience them just as they appeared on their original systems.
In 2025 QSA joined the AusEaaSI project, a national collaboration of Australian cultural institutions led by Swinburne University of Technology and powered by AARNet, Australia’s national research and education network. The project builds on technology pioneered by Yale University Library’s Digital Preservation Services team to create an emulation environment for preserving digital heritage.
As with all good technology projects, it comes with a fancy acronym that’s fun to say but doesn’t mean much to the average Australian. “Aus” for “Australian and “EaaSI” for “Emulation as a Service Infrastructure”. Through AusEaaSI, archives, libraries and museums can open old digital files in the kind of computing environment they were originally created for. Through a web browser, it’s possible to step back in time and see digital records exactly as they once appeared long after the original hardware and software have disappeared.
AusEaaSI does it: how does emulation work?
Back to that 1994 résumé, trapped on a 3.5 inch floppy disk that only your long-gone HP computer could read. Even if you still had the disk, you probably don’t have a drive that could open it. The WordPerfect software that created the file? Equally gone. So, what’s the fix?
Enter emulation. Instead of hunting down an old HP and hoping it still works, an emulator recreates how that computer once behaved with the same operating system, the same software and the same quirks. Through disc imaging, we capture a copy of data on the original medium, including the structure, the metadata and even hidden (or deleted) data that may remain on the source material. Then the emulator allows you to run a virtual version of WordPerfect. You open that résumé and see it exactly as it looked in 1994, fonts and all. (Long live Times New Roman!)
That’s what the AusEaaSI project is making possible. It connects archives, libraries and museums across Australia so they can recreate old computing environments and digital records in their original context.
Proof of concept: Wolston Park Hospital and Queensland’s heritage
We hold a lot of obsolete storage media, floppy disks of every shape and size, where only basic metadata is available. Without the ability to open the files themselves we can’t apply the same level of rigour to cataloguing that we use for other records. Emulation overcomes this problem by giving us access to the files so we can properly identify what should be preserved. And we’re already seeing glimpses of what’s possible.
Wolston Park Hospital in Wacol is Queensland’s longest-running mental health institution. In 1992 it was added to the Queensland Heritage Register as an important example of how the state delivered mental health care. Through the AusEaaSI project we’ve been able to access the original digital files created to support that listing in the 1990s. Those files include detailed architectural drawings and documentation about how the decision to save this heritage was made. Together, they provide detailed technical information on the complex and show how Queensland’s approach to preserving its built heritage had changed by the 1990s.
Run: Future.exe
This is only the start. Emulation is a slow process, but it’s a promising one. Every disk we can open, every record we can see again, adds to what Queensland will be able to remember.
Learn more about the Digital Archive and the work Queensland State Archives are doing to ensure digital files remain intact and accessible.