Technical solution

Our vision

Accessing digital material requires the mediation not just of a computer but a computer compatible with the preserved material. The very success of computing technology where machines are rapidly superseded has created a serious and growing challenge of how to preserve access to digital material produced on obsolete machines. Over time individuals and organisations build up digital assets comprising a wide variety of digital objects ranging from plain text to multimedia applications and websites. The central goal of KEEP is to provide new tools for accessing any digital object both at present and in the long term.

Strategy

Long-term preservation of digital objects not only entails secure storage and management, but also includes the development and execution of strategies to access and render these objects, now and in the future. Such strategies can roughly be divided into two groups: migration and emulation. Migration is focused on the digital object itself. Emulation does not focus on the digital object, but on the hardware and software environment in which the object is rendered. It aims at (re)creating an environment in which the digital object can be rendered in its original form. This is done by an emulator, a software application that runs on a host computer platform and recreates the targeted platform (figure 1).

The advantages of emulation is that the original digital object can be left untouched, no periodic migration cycles are needed, and functionality and appearance of the object are preserved by using its authentic software environment. However, to successfully apply emulation as a preservation strategy, several challenges have to be considered:

1. Methods are needed to securely capture the digital contents from old and obsolete data carriers.
2. Knowledge and experience have to be gathered to integrate emulation with existing operational digital archiving systems.
3. Redesign of existing emulation solutions is needed to make them sustainable and applicable for a wide variety of digital contents (text, multimedia, applications, websites, etc.)
4. Innovative solutions are required for improving use and re-use of emulated digital objects. Currently, digital contents captured by an emulated computer environment are difficult to use and re-use by end-users due to complexity of operating emulators and lack of support for additional services such as contents extraction for re-using valuable information.

The project KEEP recognises these issues and presents an integrated solution to all challenges mentioned above. KEEP stands for Keeping Emulation Environments Portable and will develop an Emulation Access Platform to enable accurate rendering of both static and dynamic digital objects. This solution will address all aspects ranging from safeguarding the original bits from the carrier to offering online services to end-users via a highly portable emulation framework running on any possible device. It not only results in a software package but also will deliver understanding about how to integrate emulation-based solutions in an operational electronic deposit system. Existing metadata models will be researched and guidelines will be developed for mapping existing digital objects to emulated manifestations.

Emulation Access Platform