Emulation Based Services in Digital Preservation

The creation of most digital objects occurs solely in interactive graphical user interfaces which were available at the particular time period. Archiving and preservation organizations are posed with large amounts of such objects of various types. At some point they will need to process these automatically to make them available to their users or convert them to a commonly used format. A substantial problem is to provide a wide range of different users with access to ancient environments and to allow using the original environment for a given object. We propose an abstract architecture for emulation services in digital preservation to provide remote user interfaces to emulation over computer networks without the need to install additional software components. Furthermore, we describe how these ideas can be integrated in a framework of web services for common preservation tasks like viewing or migrating digital objects