Digital Preservation & Emulation: from Theory to Practice

This paper will explore issues around the idea of using emulation as a digital preservation strategy. The paper will begin by showing how emulation has a strong theoretical underpinning provided by mathematical logic and computer science. The concepts of a Turing machine and the Church-Turing thesis will be presented. The paper will not claim that the strong theoretical underpinning necessarily means that emulation is a practical, cost-effective strategy for digital preservation and the paper will examine how emulation could be used in practice. The issue of how emulators themselves may be preserved ? and what happens when an emulator needs to be replaced will be discussed. The pragmatic approach to emulation being developed in the CAMiLEON project (http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/) will be presented and contrasted with other, more theoretical approaches.