The Open Planets Foundation has been steadily collecting the practical experiences of those working to solve concrete digital preservation and digital curation challenges. This began with a structure developed during the AQuA Project, where we captured information on the OPF wiki consisting of Datasets, preservation Issues with those Datasets and Solutions to the Issues.

Hardware emulators are software implementations of (past) computer architectures to reproduce original environments for a wide range of purposes. Most emulators and virtual machines are programmed for local access, which means that they are installed on the machine the user is working on.

Who are you?

My name is Per Møldrup-Dalum. I am employed at the State and University Library in Denmark and have been so since 2007. Before my present employment I worked as a system consultant for a large international software company creating systems for the newspaper industry.

The next OPF Hackathon - A Practical Approach to Preservation Systems - will focus on preservation workflows and systems. It will consider a large number of widely available tools that are being used both by the community and in industry.

Imaging of complete systems can become the appropriate appraisal method for a couple of complex objects like data bases or digital art, see e.g. the work of the Bitcurator project. This could apply to cases too, where a specific original environment is of interest, as e.g. the machine of a famous author, scientist or politician.

I recently spent a few minutes collecting together all the lists, registries and obvious sources of digital preservation tools that I could find:
http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/SPR/Digital+Preservation+Tools