There is a very first test available for a emulation based Word Perfect 6 to RTF file migration. A PLANETS web service running in Freiburg could be invoked by OPF partners running a PLANETS instance by adding an external resource.

Remote emulation has been a topic in digital preservation for a while. Several approaches to it have been explored and the feasibility of some stable prototype is pretty good. There are several different ways to achieve the separation into a server able to run the complex stuff and a rather simple client mostly limited to user in- and output.

At Freiburg the software archive has been extended: The abandoned system disks and documentation of Mac OS 7 from 1991 is a good start for a non-X86 branch of operating systems and applications. As the data survey in Archives New Zealand and the legacy of research institutions demonstrate, there is demand for other original software environments. Such operating systems are a crucial component for access through an original environment centered paradigm.

After having emulators conceptually established in digital preservation and having proved to run them actually for different original environments, the next logical step is their preparation for main-stream. To deploy emulation in e.g. Migrate workflows is a bit more complex than to wrap a simple converter like ps2pdf but might earn a much wider covering of different object types than a number of stand-alone converter tools. Same is true for emulation based Create View.

Emulators are a crucial building block in digital preservation strategies. They are supposed to bridge the widening gap between past and current digital environments. Like every other software they need to be updated from time to time if the actual environment they are running in changes. But, independent of those updates, the internal structures created for the original environments (of hard- and software) to be preserved have to be kept constant and reliable over time.

After raising this topic in PLANETS and us evangelizing at the OR2010 it was great to see quite a bit of practical approach to software archiving at Archives New Zealand.