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An experiment in using emulation to preserve digital publications

PREFACE This report presents the results of a small study undertaken by RAND-Europe for the National Library of the Netherlands (the Koninklijke Bibliotheek or " KB ") in connection with their work on the NEDLIB (Networked European Deposit Library) effort (described below), jointly funded by the European Commission's Telematics for Libraries Programme. This study was performed as the first phase of a longer-term effort by the KB to test and evaluate the feasibility of using emulation as a means of preserving digital publications in accessible, authentic, and usable form within a deposit library. Since this report is intended to document the results of this study for the KB, it relies heavily on the KB's understanding of the context in which the study was performed, including issues concerning the background of the problem, the motivation for the study, and the choice of approach and methodology. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the discussion may be of interest to other members of the library community as well as archivists, government recordkeepers, and preservationists concerned with the problem of preserving information in the digital age. SUMMARY This report presents the results of a small study undertaken by RAND-Europe for the National Library of the Netherlands (the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, or " KB ") in connection with their work on the NEDLIB (Networked European Deposit Library) effort (described below), jointly funded by the European Commission's Telematics for Libraries Programme. This study was intended to be the first phase of a longer-term effort by the KB to test and evaluate the feasibility of using emulation as a means of preserving digital publications in accessible, authentic, and usable form within a deposit library. The increasing use of digital technology to produce documents, databases, and publications has a serious flaw: there are so far no available techniques for ensuring that digital information will remain accessible, readable, and usable in the future. Unless libraries, archives, government agencies, and other recordkeeping organizations find ways to ensure the longevity of digital artifacts, considerable amounts of valuable information may be lost forever. Within the library and archives communities, it is now generally recognized that digital information must be copied to new storage media quite frequently, since such media become physically unreadable or obsolete within a few short years. But there is a more complicated impediment to preserving the digital information stored on such media: Digital information can be rendered usable only by running …