Adding Emulation Functionality to Existing Digital Preservation Infrastructure

The emulation of obsolete hardware and software environments to enable information to be read, and to facilitate interaction in a way that simulates the original user experience, is a well- established part of digital preservation solutions. Excellent tools have been developed to work with emulators, but these have remained in the research domain rather than being able to be exploited at scale. This paper explores a real example of how an emulation framework has been added to existing digital preservation infrastructure. This integration has enabled information has been extracted from obsolete hardware, held in a digital preservation system at Yale University Library (YUL), and linked to an appropriate emulator (provided by the University of Freiburg’s Emulation as a Service framework). All of this enables YUL to recreate the user experience of interacting with content using the original software quickly and easily whenever a user requests it. This integration offers the prospect of large scale emulation as a service linked to real preserved data that is in need of this approach and this paper will examine the next steps needed to make this a reality