Virtualizing the CIC Floppy Disk Project: an Experiment in Digital Preservation Using Emulation

The CIC floppy disk project (FDP) is a partnership between the U.S. Government Printing Office and Indiana University Bloomington to make publications that were distributed to federal depository libraries on floppy disk available on the Internet. The FDP does not provide software to access these publications many of which depend upon obsolete application and operating system software. This paper describes an experiment to provide support for the publications in the FDP using obsolete software executing within off-the-shelf virtualization tools. These tools provide for the creation of “software images” consisting of an operating system and application software which can be executed in conjunction with data files by an application program to provide an “original” execution environment within a modern operating system. Virtualization is a special case of emulation which has frequently been discussed in the context of digital preservation, but has not been applied on any large heterogeneous data sets such as those in the FDP. The results of this paper apply equally to the emulation.