Emulation has been proposed as a preservation strategy for longevity of digital objects. An advantage of emulation is the relative platform independency. Emulation with a high degree of platform independency requires a Universal Virtual Computer (UVC), as described by Lorie. This paper describes the realization of the enhanced UVC developed for the National Library of the Netherlands. The preservation method of the UVC at preservation time and at retrieval time (in the future) is concisely described, the conceptual model of the UVC is given, and the object design and the logical data viewer of the UVC are presented. The UVC has been realized and proven to work for image types using the JPEG and GIF87a formats, although performance of the present UVC can still can be improved. The UVC demonstration tool is freely available at the Alphaworks web site to let the general public experience this approach on long-term access.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Cedars , Curl Exemplars in Digital Archives (1998). Available at: www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/ (accessed 15 December 2004).
2.
CAMiLEON , Creative Archiving at Michigan & Leeds: Emulating the Old on the New (1999). Available at: www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/ (accessed 15 December 2004).
3.
NEDLIB , Networked European Deposit Library (1998). Available at: www.kb.nl/coop/nedlib/ (accessed 15 December 2004).
4.
T. van der Werf-Davelaar , Long-term preservation of electronic publications: the NEDLIB project , D-Lib Magazine5(9) (1999). Available at: www.dlib.org/dlib/september99/vanderwerf/09vanderwerf.html (accessed 15 December 2004).
5.
Koninklijke Bibliotheek , National Library of the Netherlands (2004). Available at: www.kb.nl (accessed 15 December 2004).
6.
LTP study , KB/IBM Long-Term Preservation Study (2002). Available at: www.kb.nl/hrd/dd/dd_onderzoek/dnep_ltp_study.html (accessed 15 December 2004).
7.
AdobeTM Portable Document Format (PDF) (2004). Available at: www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readermain.html (accessed 15 December 2004).
8.
World Wide Web Consortium , SGML is ISO standard 8879:1991 (1995). Available at: www.w3.org/MarkUp/SGML/ (accessed 15 December 2004).
9.
World Wide Web Consortium , XML Tutorial (1999). Available at: www.w3schools.com/xml/default.asp (accessed 15 December 2004).
10.
N. Ritter , The unofficial TIFF homepage (1997). Available at: http://home.earthlink.net/%7Eritter/tiff/ (accessed 15 December 2004).
11.
DIAS , Digital Information Archiving System (2003). Available at: www-5.ibm.com/nl/dias/ (accessed 15 December 2004).
12.
J.F. Steenbakkers , Treasuring the digital records of science: archiving e-journals at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek , RLG Diginews8(2) (2004). Available at: www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=17068 (accessed 15 December 2004).
13.
C. Bellekom:Building preservation functionality in a digital archive: the National Library of the Netherlands , Learned Publishing17(4) (2004), 275-280 .
14.
W. Roberts:Long-term preservation of electronic information , Bulletin of the Records Management Society123 (December 2004) 3-7 .
15.
J. Rothenberg , Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation (1998). Available at: www.clir.org/pubs/reports/rothenberg/contents.html (accessed 15 December 2004).
16.
Emulation: context and current status, Digital Preservation Testbed, The Hague, The Netherlands (2003). Available at: www.digitaleduurzaamheid.nl/bibliotheek/docs/white_paper_emulatie_EN.pdf (accessed 15 December 2004).
17.
Wikipedia: the Free Encyclopedia , List of Emulators (2004). Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emulators (accessed 15 December 2004).
18.
B. Supnik , Simulators: virtual machines of the past (and future) , Queue2(5) (2004), 52-58 .
19.
Bochs , Think inside the Bochs (2004). Available at: http://bochs.sourceforge.net (accessed 15 December 2004).
20.
QEMU CPU Emulator (2004). Available at: http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ (accessed 15 December 2004).
21.
P. Mellor , P. Wheatley and D. Sergeant , Migration on Request: a Practical Technique for Digital Preservation, ECDL 2002, Rome, Italy (2003). Available at: www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/reports/migreq.pdf (accessed 15 December 2004).
22.
J. Rothenberg , Using Emulation to Preserve Digital Documents, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, The Netherlands (2000). Available at: www.kb.nl/pr/publ/usingemulation.pdf (accessed 15 December 2004).
23.
R.A. Lorie , A methodology and system for preserving digital data . In: G. Marchionini and W. Hersh (eds), Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2002) Portland, Oregon (ACM, New York, 2002) 312-319 .
24.
R.A. Lorie , The UVC: A Method for Preserving Digital Documents: Proof of Concept. The Hague, IBM and Koninklijke Bibliotheek (2002). Available at: www.kb.nl/hrd/dd/dd_onderzoek/reports/4-uvc.pdf (accessed 15 December 2004).
25.
J.F. Steenbakkers , Preserving electronic publications , Information Services and Use22(2-3) (2002) 89-96 .
26.
E. Oltmans and H. van Wijngaarden , Digital preservation in practice: the e-Depot at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek , VINE34(1) (2004) 21-26 .
27.
JPEG JFIF image format specification (2003). Available at: www.w3.org/Graphics/JPEG/ (accessed 15 December 2004).
28.
Compuserve , Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) specification (1987). Available at: www.w3.org/Graphics/GIF/spec.gif89a.txt (accessed 21 January 2005).
29.
The Java Performance Report (1999?). Available at: www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Node/2005/jpr/ (accessed 15 December 2004).
30.
IBM , Alphaworks Emerging Technologies, Digital Asset Preservation Tool (2004). Available at: www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/uvc (accessed 15 December 2004).
