A Future Emulation and Automation Research Agenda

After significant research and proven usefulness especially for complex, dynamic and interactive objects emulation is not widely adapted in digital preservation at all. While some significant building blocks of emulation based strategies are present a number of components are still unsatisfactory or missing. This paper proposes a research agenda for the future integration of emulation into preservation workflows. It discusses prerequisites and requirements for fully automated services operating in large scale environments. Those include the replacement of user interaction by using a standard interfacing protocol like Virtual Network Computing, proper system image and software components archiving and the ''preservation aware'' emulator. To achieve this additional channels to control the emulator and monitor its states are required. This paper analyses the state of the art in emulation and motivates the need for introducing additional control channels.