Emulation of previous hardware environments offers a solution to accessing old information.

Emulation is a less developed approach and is intended to deliver a synthetic hardware environment on which old operating systems and programs (both preserved within the system) run, to enable the original files to be used as they are. Simulating the action of old hardware using software is complex especially where such aspects as clock speed and interaction with specific hardware is important. It can be useful for active content such as databases where the value is as much in the interaction with the data as the raw data itself. Other examples include computer games where consoles may no longer run in the future so need to be synthesised in software. As might be expected, this huge challenge requires future research to become truly useful.

Case Study
A problem that cultural heritage institutions are facing these days is providing continued access to their digital information over time. A proven strategy for simple digital objects such as images and documents is migration: the transferring of data to newer system environments. However, complex digital objects such as databases, multimedia applications and games have behaviour and other properties that is harder to preserve via migration and thus run the risk of losing some, if not all of their functionality. [ Read More ]