Emulation: From Digital Artefact to Remotely Rendered Environments

Abstract

Emulation used as a long-term preservation strategy offers the possibility to keep digital objects in their original condition and experience them within their original computer environment. However, having only an emulator in place is not enough. To apply emulation as a fully-fledged strategy, an automated and user-friendly approach is required. This can not be done without knowledge of the original software and contextual information about it. This presentation gives an overview on the existing concept of a view path, which captures contextual information of software, together with new insights to improve the concept with extra metadata. It provides regularly updated instructions for archival management to preserve and access its artifacts. The view path model requires extensions of the metadata set of primary object of interest and depends on additionally stored secondary objects for environment recreation like applications or operating systems. This presentation also addresses a strategy to render digital objects by running emulation processes on distance. The advantages of this strategy are that it improves user convenience while maximizing emulation capabilities.