How to Party Like it’s 1999: Emulation for Everyone
Emulated access of complex media has long been discussed, but there are very few instances in which complex, interactive, born-digital emulations are available to researchers. New York Public Library has made 1980-90’s era video games from 5.25″ floppy disks in the Timothy Leary Papers accessible via a DosBox emulator. These games appear in various stages of development and display the work of at least four of Leary’s collaborators on the games. 56 disk images from the Leary Papers are currently emulated in the reading room. New York University has made late 1990s-mid 2000’s era Photoshop files from the Jeremy Blake Papers accessible to researchers. The Blake Papers include over 300 pieces of media. Cornell University Library was awarded a grant from the NEH to analyze approximately 100 born-digital artworks created for CD-ROM from the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art to develop preservation workflows, access strategies, and metadata frameworks. Rhizome has undertaken a number of emulation projects as a major part of its preservation strategy for born-digital artworks. In cooperation with the University of Freiburg in Germany, Rhizome recently restored several digital artworks for public access using a cloud-based emulation framework. This framework (bwFLA) has been designed to facilitate the reenactments of software on a large scale, for internal use or public access. This paper will guide readers through how to implement emulation. Each of the institutions weigh in on oddities and idiosyncrasies they encountered throughout the process — from accession to access.