Emulation is a strategy receiving increasing attention in the long-term digital archiving community. It can act as a complement to the otherwise dominant digital preservation strategies of migration and has convincing advantages, especially for dynamic digital objects. Nevertheless, a range of conditions must be met for successful reproduction of such digital objects in the future.
The incorporation of view paths to identify the necessary metadata as well as additional software components may propose extensions of the OAIS reference model. This paper combines this view path concept, which captures the contextual information of software, with additional insights, thereby improving the flexibility of the approach.
The concept provides insights into workflow instructions allowing for the archive management to preserve access to its artifacts. The view path model requires extensions of the metadata sets of the primary object as well as additionally stored secondary objects resulting in a reproduction of the object’s environment, e.g. applications or operating systems.
This paper addresses strategies regarding reference environments and gives an outlook for how to apply emulation strategies in the long-term while improving user convenience and maximizing emulation capabilities.
