Hardware emulators are software implementations of (past) computer architectures to reproduce original environments for a wide range of purposes. Most emulators and virtual machines are programmed for local access, which means that they are installed on the machine the user is working on.
We have recently started some research at Archives New Zealand to investigate the best approaches for appraising, transferring (where relevant) and preserving databases.
As part of this research we will be undertaking case studies of a number of databases. The case studies will involve a number of aspects including where possible testing one or more preservation approaches on each database. We hope to publish the results of this research at the end of the project.
…or at least part of this dream. Recently, the KEEP project released its final version of the Emulation Framework (2.0). This software is now available for free and open source on http://emuframework.sf.net
Maintaining the ability of an organisation or user to be able to “open” or “render” a file or set of files is one of the core digital preservation challenges. The Rendering Matters Report outlines the results of research conducted at Archives New Zealand investigating whether changes are introduced to th
The bwFLA project (Baden-Wuerttemberg Functional Longterm Archiving and Access) is a two-year state sponsored project with the goal of defining and providing a practical implementation of archival workflows for the rendering of digital objects (i.e. easily accessed by users) in its original environment (i.e. application).
Following up on the idea of system imaging or "snapshotting" discussed in a previous post and presented at this year’s iPRES 2011, a general concept of long-term sustainable computer systems could emerge. Why not take emulation into consideration when designing future systems and defining their requirements?
The typical reading room computer in libraries, archives and often museums is equipped with a way for patrons to search and browse the institutions catalogues and digital collections. The digital collections are often rather restricted by the systems to making accessible only a few of today's multimedia formats and documents types (for example PDF, jpeg and a few audio or video formats).
The draft programme for Future Perfect 2012 is now available online!
The theme of Future Perfect 2012 - Digital Preservation by Design - seeks to stimulate discussion about how, when and why influencing the design of systems can support digital preservation and ultimately ensure that today’s information is available tomorrow. Future Perfect 2012 will be a two day conference featuring many exciting international speakers.
Our audience will hear presentations from:
Emulation requires disk images to be provided and used for the main hard drive of emulated computers.
Digital objects are often more complex than their common perception as individual files or small sets of files. Standard digital preservation methods can lose important parts, or the context of digital objects. Interestingly enough thousands of miles apart Maurice van den Dobbelsteen (The Netherlands) and Euan Cochrane (New Zealand) simultaneously proposed a new approach to cope with the special requirements of their National Archives in dealing with the different types of complex objects.