The electronic collections of today's libraries, museums and archives are growing and increasingly have a more relevant role in the holdings. Memory institutions must address users' need to access a widening range of digital artefacts. Often the formats of those artefacts are outdated and they cannot be run or rendered on today's systems any longer. This is where emulation can provide the required digital environments suitable for a given object type. Practical research is being done at Freiburg University for the Open Planets Foundation on how to integrate different emulators for a number of original environments into a single graphical desktop. In this case study, options for future reading room systems like stateless Linux workstations are evaluated and prototypical implementations are demonstrated
