A Future Emulation and Automation Research Agenda

Despite significant research and the proven usefulness for complex, dynamic and interactive objects emulation remains not widely adapted in digital preservation. While some significant building blocks of emulation based strategies are present a number of components are still unsatisfactory or missing. This paper proposes a research agenda for the future integration of emulation into preservation workflows. It discusses prerequisites and requirements for fully automated services operating in large scale environments. Those include the replacement of user interaction by using a standard interfacing protocol like Virtual Network Computing, proper system image and software components archiving and the ”preservation aware” emulator. To achieve the latter, additional goal channels are required to control the emulator and monitor its states. This paper analyses the state of the art in emulation and motivates the need for an advanced research agenda in this field.