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This edition of PIK features a special section on emulation as a digital preservation strategy. Special attention is paid to a current topic in computer-, libraryand archivalsciences: reliable long-term preservation and access to digital artifacts. With mass digitalization of content and data information is anytime, anywhere and to unlimited extend accessible. What is often overlooked is that access to digital material is not naturally guaranteed in the mediumand long-run. Long-term preservation of both genuine digital objects and retro-digitized resources but also its availability and accessibility for future generations is a challenge for a wide range of institution like research facilities, government agencies, libraries, archives, museums and commercial entities. Data and information loss in these institutions would have far-reaching consequences for economic, scientific, social and political domains. A further major challenge arises from the preservation of access to research data. It has always been fundamental to a wide range of domains in science but has grown substantially in complexity and scale in the last couple of years. More and more primary data is generated solely in the digital domain and gets processed in inter-disciplinary projects and complex workflows. The associated costs of archiving activities are consistently rather small in proportion to the initial costs to acquire or generate them. Additionally the data is required to remain available of certain periods of time to fulfill the requirements of reproducible scientific results and to follow open data strategies. Especially in the long-run data can not be processed and interpreted in a meaningful way, if the original set of tools and workflows is not available anymore. Proper archival workflows are required to ensure and proof the preservation of all necessary components over the relevant periods. Permanent storage and access is technically feasible but challenging. Planning and continuous curation are necessary to secure long-term access. To face these challenges a holistic approach which considers the complete digital life-cycle is necessary. For more than fifteen years there has been a vital debate on using emulation as a strategy to ensure longterm access to digital artifacts. Although emulation has always been an essential addition for many types of digital objects, emulation strategies still have little relevance in practice despite many shortcomings of format migration. Migration is the method most deployed and trusted by memory institutions for long-term archiving of digital objects. This strategy moves along digital objects through the constantly changing digital environment, made up of the changing hardware and software configurations. This usually requires alterations to the object and its inner structures and limits not only unnecessarily the amount of object types that can be archived but can not be applied to the growing number of complex digital artifacts. Thus, migration has to deal with a constantly growing amount of digital artifacts of an increasing range of different types. With the rising number of individual migration steps the risk of mistreating the objects increases. Especially for more complex objects there don’t exist methods of proof to fully audit the retention of all significant properties. Following from this problem set and considering the increasingly complex digital objects of today and the future, the digital preservation scene is faced by a paradigm shift from the prevailing migration strategy to emulation. Emulation does not operate on the object itself, but creates means to preserve its original digital environment. Hence, the original state of the digital artifact and its authenticity is not challenged by modifications on the object itself. Emulation as a preservation strategy for memory institutions has been researched since Jeff Rothenberg’s article in Scientific American Magazine (1995). The strategy relies on emulating hardand/or software that has become obsolete. DOI 10.1515/pik-2012-0051 PIK 2012; 35(4): 225–226

Long-term Preservation in the Digital Age – Emulation as a Generic Preservation Strategy: