bwFLA – A Functional Approach to Digital Preservation

Abstract

Emulation evolves into a mature digital preservation strategy, providing authentic functional access to a wide range of digital objects, using their original creation environments. In contrast to format migration strategies a functional, emulation-based approach requires a number of additional components, i.e. the full softwarestack required to render a digital object but also its configuration. The goal of the bwFLA project is the implementation and development of a distributed framework for emulation-based services and technologies to address Baden-Württemberg state and higher education institutes' libraries' and archives' new challenges in digital long-term preservation.The Baden-Württemberg Functional Long-Term Archiving and Access (bwFLA) 1 is a two-year state sponsored project transporting the results of past and ongoing digital preservation research into practitioners communities. Primarily, bwFLA creates tools and workflows to ensure long-term access to digital cultural and scientific assets held by the state's university libraries and archives. The project consortium brings together partners across the state, involving people from university libraries computing centers, libraries and archives, providing a broad range of background and insights into the digital preservation landscape.The project builds on existing digital preservation knowledge by integrating and extending established preservation frameworks. It will define and provide a practical implementation of archival workflows to re-enact digital objects in their original environment (e.g. creation application) where suitable migration strategies are unavailable, for instance, interactive objects, software, scientific toolchains and databases, but also digital art.

Metadata and video games emulation: an effective bond to achieve authentic preservation?

“…The Baden-Württemberg functional long-term archiving and access, otherwise knows as bwFLA, is an emulation framework that is being developed at the University of Freiburg (Rechert et al, 2012). The BwFLA supports the TOTEM schema to establish an object's dependencies and its hardware requirements that are virtually replaced by an emulator.…”

Adding emulation functionality to existing digital preservation infrastructure

“…This (amongst other reasons) [1] has limited the acceptance of emulation as a viable long term digital preservation method. Fortunately in recent years tools that simplify the use of emulators in these contexts such as JMESS 2 and bwFLA Emulation as a Service (EaaS) [2], have become more readily available and are increasingly being used in production environments. With these emulation tools and services coming of age it is becoming increasingly realistic for digital preservation infrastructure providers and developers to consider how emulation can fit into their products and services.…”