title: How to Stop Negative Maintenance of Legacy Systems to Rescue Historical Data: Inspiration From Data Archiving In China With The Participation Of Comprehensive Archives
creators: Jiemin Pan XinYu An
abstract: Nowadays, Rescuing valuable historical data from legacy systems is an important challenge in digital transformation. Long-term negative maintenance of legacy systems threatens the security and availability of historical data, and also brings economic and technical burdens. In the Chinese context, this article first concludes the requirements triangle which means the public sectors' need to rescue historical data of legacy systems lies in three aspects: data long-term preservation, data used as evidence and data sharing and utilization. Based on a review of the relevant literature, this paper categorizes the existing approaches related to legacy systems into a two-dimensional matrix with four quadrants according to the degree of technological and functional change. Building on these approaches, and in order to further meet the requirements triangle, this article suggests a Chinese solution - data archiving, which is based on China's institutional background and archive management demands. Data archiving incorporates the comprehensive archives into the process of solving legacy system problems, takes advantage of the expertise of archives in long-term preservation of resources, and finally satisfies the requirements triangle. It can be concluded that the practice of data archiving simultaneously brings value to organizations plagued by legacy systems, to comprehensive archives and to the data itself.
keywords: approaches to preservation from document to data