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Re: Electronic Archive



I hesitated to go into emulation because I don't think I can do the subject
justice.  I went to a seminar in Boston a year or two ago where the concepts
of migration and emulation were compared.  Fynette Eaton of NARA spoke on
migration, which is, as you might expect, the idea of upgrading files to the
latest version of a software to keep it usable.  The other speaker was
Jeffrey Rothenberg, who talked about building little packages of data that
include both the file and the program.

Here's a summary I wrote in November when something similar came up:

The second approach, more complicated but more intriguing, was called
"Emulation", and the idea was to capture all the information in a standard
format (something like ASCII if I remember correctly), but with everything
including the look and "feel" of the data as originally presented, coded
into a kind of packet. The idea (though it's a year ago and my memory is
untrustworthy) was that if you can trap everything about a program in a
standard code that can be read, anybody on any machine would be able to
reconstruct the original app & data almost exactly as it was when it was
created.

URL for that whole post from the archives of the list:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/SCRIPTS/WA.EXE?A2=ind0111A&L=archives&P=R8272

A search of the archives under "emulation" got some hits on the subject,
though it also got some stuff on PC emulation for the Mac.

Anyway, as I said, it's an interesting concept.

DS
______________________________________
Daniel Sokolow, Archives Coordinator
David Taylor Archives
North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System
155 Community Drive
Great Neck, NY 11021
mailto:dsokolow@nshs.edu

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