Towards Emulation-as-a-Service: Cloud Services for Versatile Digital Object Access

Abstract

The changing world of IT services opens the chance to more tightly integrate digital long-term preservation into systems, both for commercial and end users. The emergence of cloud offerings re-centralizes services, and end users interact with them remotely through standardized (web-)client applications on their various devices. This offers the chance to use partially the same concepts and methods to access obsolete computer environments and allows for more sustainable business processes. In order to provide a large variety of user-friendly remote emulation services, especially in combination with authentic performance and user experience, a distributed system model and architecture is required, suitable to run as a cloud service, allowing for the specialization both of memory institutions and third party service providers.The shift of the usually non-trivial task of the emulation of obsolete software environments from the end user to specialized providers can help to simplify digital preservation and access strategies. Besides offering their users better access to their holdings, libraries and archives may gain new business opportunities to offer services to a third party, such as businesses requiring authentic reproduction of digital objects and processes for legal reasons. This paper discusses cloud concepts as the next logical step for accessing original digital material. Emulation-as-a-Service (EaaS) fills the gap between the successful demonstration of emulation strategies as a long term access strategy and it’s perceived availability and usability. EaaS can build upon the ground of research and prototypical implementations of previous projects, and reuse well established remote access technology.In this article we develop requirements and a system model, suitable for a distributed environment. We will discuss the building blocks of the core services as well as requirements regarding access management. Finally, we will try to present a business model and estimate costs to implement and run such a service. The implementations of EaaS will influence future preservation planning in memory institutions, as it shifts the focus on object access workflows.

Digital curation and costs

“…It is crystal clear that these costs are heavy for an institution, and we also need to remember the service's volume to ensure it successfully satisfies the needs of its users. Suchodoletz et al [51] propose an alternative use of a public cloud so that institutions may avoid the maintenance of expensive and underused servers. q) Sustainability: Ayris [3] identifies a set of key-elements to obtain a long-term sustainability of digital collections and Poole [39] considers that institutions tend to dedicate a residual part of their budgets to curation and financing, which does not increase alongside the growth in data.…”

“…In one of the studies about management and business models, Wilson & Jeffreys [56] conclude that business models have a better production at the level of individual components, rather than at the level of the whole infrastructure. Poole [39] argues that the development of business models, as well as cooperation through preservation networks are essential concerns when computing costs, and are deeply related to the issue of costs sharing, as exemplified by Suchodoletz et al [51]. Wilson & Jeffreys [56] raise a rather unexplored question about the utility of assessing the potential the public has to absorb a service, according to the capacity in planning and development of the business model.…”

Emulation practices for software preservation in libraries, archives, and museums

“…Or perhaps emulation could resemble a special collections model where researchers are trained to witness a set of documents in the original order with which a creator originally assembled and used them over the course of their work. A number of initiatives have explored remote services, providing emulation environments for users to potentially access materials online (Rechert et al, 2010; von Suchodoletz et al, 2013; von Suchodoletz & van der Hoeven, 2009). But remote emulation access assumes broad digital rights over the software and knowledge of the original application or computing environment.…”

“…An emulator is intended to faithfully reproduce information, experience, or form with hardware or software, or in combination. But accessing obsolete software with emulation approaches is time and resource intensive, so emulation as a service provision for long‐term preservation and archiving is currently being experimented with (Rechert et al, 2010; von Suchodoletz et al, 2013).…”

The preservation of disk-based content at the British Library

“…A decision tree (Figure 2) was produced, which differentiated between content types in order to inform selection of an initial approach for testing in the lab, either emulation or migration. For emulation, the project team tested Emulation as a Service (EaaS) from the University of Freiburg (Liebetraut et al, 2014; Suchodoletz et al, 2013) alongside a small number of existing emulators freely available online. For migration, software was selected as appropriate to the content type and original format of each title.…”