Back in 2010 the often-expressed mantra was that bit preservation was a ‘solved problem’. In the UK higher education (HE) sector, there was also a view that we now had all the digital repositories that we needed and therefore the preservation of simple digital objects (for instance, scholarly articles in PDF format) should – in theory, anyway – no longer be a problem. That may have been an over-simplification but regardless of its merits it did open up some space to start thinking about digital objects that were not so straightforward. Along with the problem of scale, the preservation of ‘complex objects’ was a regular topic of discussion when research challenges were being considered and it therefore seemed sensible for Jisc to try to help the community to address the issue of complexity when funding became available.

At the briefing meeting for the Jisc Infrastructure for Education and Research Programme, in October 2010, I set out the requirements for one of the areas of work in the programme. It invited proposals for a single collaborative project to ‘to produce a definition and description of the effective preservation of complex visual digital materials and develop recommendations for practice’. Happily, we did receive proposals in response to this call; and even better, what transpired was the POCOS (Preservation of Complex Objects Symposia) project that organized a series of symposia and produced the original publications which form the basis of this book.

One of the original challenges of defining the work that became the POCOS project was to somehow limit the scope. Most disciplines and many domains of work have to deal with digital materials that are dynamic and have embedded material, or complex dependencies and behaviours, but the realm of preserving complex visual objects (particularly cultural objects) seemed under-researched. To break the work down into more manageable components and to give it some shape, one of the early decisions prior to announcing the call was to divide the territory into three sub-domains: simulations and visualizations; gaming environments and virtual worlds; and software-based art.