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.
The agenda can be seen at: http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/KB/Agenda+-+OPF+Hackathon+-+A+Practical+Approach+to+Preservation+Systems
Registration opening soon...
Beginning of this year we reported on first results of a joint Archives New Zealand and University of Freiburg data recovery project of a set of 5.25 inch floppy disks from the early 1990s. After recovering the raw bitstreams from the floppy disks with a special hardware device the resulting image files were sent over to Freiburg for further analysis.
I spent last week at the Open Planets Foundation Database Archiving event at the Statens Arkvier in Copenhagen. There was a good mix of people, both technical and practicioners, with some informative presentations, and it was interesting to see the different approaches to the problem.
To my mind there appeared to be two distinct classes of use case:
As a first encounter with database archiving, FoxPro is a nice challenge. This is the story of our first database archiving attempt.
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
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 challenges and changes that archivists and information management professionals face are based on the need to manage, preserve and make accessible our collections be they paper, film, audio visual or digital formats. Join the ICA in Brisbane in 2012 for a congress program that is focused, innovative and interactive.
The congress will examine our ‘climate of change’ through the themes: