In the middle of November 2012, the first OPF Hackathon on Emulation took place in Freiburg, Germany. It brought together practitioners from different national libraries, library information services as well as a couple of researchers in the domain. The aim of the three-day Hackathon was to work on practical use-cases and real-live challenges stemming from actual collections and legal requirements. In parallel to the hack and experiment sessions, a couple of presentations looked into a wide range of aspects with regards to emulation and related access strategies.

The iPRES conference and with it the workshop “Towards Practical Emulation Tools and Strategies – State of the Art Research Meets Real-World Requirements” in Toronto is finally approaching. The workshop will take place on the first day of the conference on Monday, October 1st. We updated the workshop program and added the different suggested topics from the “call of participation”.

Emulation is getting more and more relevant in digital preservation and thus got its first full-day workshop at this years iPRES in Toronto on 1st October. While emulation is now widely accepted as a necessary access strategy, mature software frameworks and workflows are still missing. The workshop provides the opportunity to present latest research results, status quo of emulation application and use cases.

With the final presentation of the student discussing his CTOS filesystem recovery study in Freiburg it is time to draw a conclusion and summarize the lessons-learnt. The original problem was a set of CTOS floppies (this fact was to be discovered first, see a previous post on this topic). It represents a microcosm of the archival challenges at the beginning of the information recovery chain.

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. The screen output gets redirected into a window or the whole screen of the host system as the input devices like mouse and keyboard are redirected to the emulator upon focus.

Imaging of complete systems can become the appropriate appraisal method for a couple of complex objects like data bases or digital art, see e.g. the work of the Bitcurator project. This could apply to cases too, where a specific original environment is of interest, as e.g. the machine of a famous author, scientist or politician. The joint Archives New Zealand and University of Freiburg paper at iPRES 2011 discussed a couple of aspects on system imaging.

With the successful reviving of just another operating system to rerun a database in its original environment it makes sense to look deeper into the single steps, general workflow requirements and possible options for at least partial automation of system imaging.