title: Replicating Installed Application and Information Environments onto Emulated or Virtualized Hardware
creators: Dirk von Suchodoletz Euan Cochrane
abstract: Digital objects are often more complex than their common perception as individual files or small sets of files. Standard digital preservation methods can lose important parts of digital objects, or the context of digital objects. To deal with the different types of complex digital objects, and to cope with their special requirements, we propose applying emulation from a different perspective in order to preserve the whole original environment of single digital objects or groups of digital objects. Many of today's preservation scenarios would benefit from a change in our understanding of digital objects. Our understanding should be shifted up from the single digital files or small groups of files as they are commonly conceived of, to full computer systems. When this shift in perspective is undertaken two important outcomes result: 1. the subject of preservation includes a much richer level of context and 2. the tools available for preserving them are constricted. In this paper we describe a workflow to be used for replicating installed application environments that have the x86 architecture onto emulated or virtualized hardware, we discuss the potential for automating steps in the workflow and conclude by addressing some of the possible issues with this approach.
keywords: singapore emulation disk imaging virtualization complex digital object original digital ecosystem