title: Towards a Universal Virtual Interactor (UVI) for Digital Objects
abstract: Practitioners generally agree that providing a service to enable opening and interacting with born digital objects in their “original” software is valuable for historians, researchers and the general public so that they can experience full-fidelity experiences of the objects. Enabling this has, to date, been a difficult, time-consuming, relatively resource intensive, and tedious. In this paper, we show how we are on the verge of creating a new method and series of tools to simplify and automate the process of interacting with digital objects in their original software and greatly reduce the time and resource costs of doing so. We outline the history of the developments in the areas of emulation and software preservation that we have built on and we outline the concept of this set of tools and processes we call the “Universal Virtual Interactor”. We also discuss how the UVI is being created, and finally we discuss how it may be improved upon in the future and how it may be implemented in access and discovery tools.