Emulation: From Digital Artefact to Remotely Rendered Environments

Abstract

Emulation used as a long-term preservation strategy offers the potential to keep digital objects in their original condition and experience them within their original computer environment. However, having just an emulator in place is not enough. To apply emulation as a fully fledged strategy, an automated and user-friendly approach is required. This cannot be done without knowledge and contextual information of the original software. This paper combines the existing concept of a view path, which captures the contextual information of software, together with new insights into improving the concept with extra metadata. It provides regularly updated instructions for archival management to preserve and access its artefacts. The view-path model requires extensions to the metadata set of the primary object of interest and depends on additionally stored secondary objects for environment recreation like applications or operating systems. This article also addresses a strategy of rendering digital objects by running emulation processes remotely. The advantage of this strategy is that it improves user convenience while maximizing emulation capability.