Emulation in Practice

Since 1999, determining the viability of emulation as a means to preserve digital assets has been up for debate. Throughout the last twenty years, emulation has been refuted, proven effective, and compared to other digital preservation strategies, like migration, almost simultaneously. This paper analyzes the various considerations involved when using emulation as a digital preservation strategy between 1999 and 2019. Three research methodologies are employed: 1) historical research as described in published literature, 2) case studies described in various sources, and 3) personal open-ended interviews conducted with experts active in the field over the past couple of decades and currently

Digital Preservation Activities and Attitudes in American and Canadian Academic Libraries

Digital materials are highly used resources in academic libraries and absorb a significant cost in their creation. While digital materials greatly improve access to and usability of information, these materials must be actively maintained and preserved. Recent surveys, however, indicate that many libraries are not implementing adequate digital preservation techniques to insure their investments. This study surveyed American and Canadian institutions regarding their digital preservation processes and attitudes, with a specific focus on the comparison of processes and attitudes in institutions that have participated in a national digitization or digital preservation grant (grant receiving institutions) and non grant receiving institutions. The results suggest that grant receiving institutions are just as likely to implement migration, emulation, or digital archeology for digital image files as non-grant receiving institutions and that migration is the most widely implemented preservation strategy and is perceived as more effective than emulation or digital archeology by ARL institutions

Consider the Source: The Value of Source Code to Digital Preservation Strategies

One of the major challenges in the digital preservation field is the difficulty of ensuring long-term access to digital objects, especially in cases when the software that was used to create an object is no longer current. Software source code has a human-readable, documentary structure that makes it an overlooked aspect of digital preservation strategies, in addition to a valuable component for the records of modern computing history. The author surveys several approaches to software preservation and finds that, by supporting open source initiatives, digital libraries can improve their ability to preserve access to their collections for future generations

Planets: Integrated Services for Digital Preservation

The Planets Project is developing services and technology to address core challenges in digital preservation. This article introduces the motivation for this work, describes the extensible technical architecture and places the Planets approach into the context of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. It also provides a scenario demonstrating Planets’ usefulness in solving real-life digital preservation problems and an overview of the project’s progress to date

Changing Trains at Wigan: Digital Preservation and the Future of Scholarship

This paper examines the impact of the emerging digital landscape on long term access to material created in digital form and its use for research; it examines challenges, risks and expectations.

Video game preservation in the UK: a survey of records management practices

Video games are a cultural phenomenon; a medium like no other that has become one of the largest entertainment sectors in the world. While the UK boasts an enviable games development heritage, it risks losing a major part of its cultural output through an inability to preserve the games that are created by the country’s independent games developers. The issues go deeper than bit rot and other problems that affect all digital media; loss of context, copyright and legal issues, and the throwaway culture of the ‘next’ game all hinder the ability of fans and academics to preserve video games and make them accessible in the future. This study looked at the current attitudes towards preservation in the UK’s independent (‘indie’) video games industry by examining current record-keeping practices and analysing the views of games developers. The results show that there is an interest in preserving games, and possibly a desire to do so, but issues of piracy and cost prevent the industry from undertaking preservation work internally, and from allowing others to assume such responsibility. The recommendation made by this paper is not simply for preservation professionals and enthusiasts to collaborate with the industry, but to do so by advocating the commercial benefits that preservation may offer to the industry