KEEPing old digital objects usable

Stephen Withers
Monday, 16 February 2009 10:30

IT Industry - Market

KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable) is intended to provide for the ongoing accurate rendering of static and dynamic digital objects by developing an emulation platform that can be used into the future to accurately render a wide variety of such objects on successive generations of hardware.

The project is particularly concerned with "cultural heritage" such as photographs, digital artwork and videogames, but the issue has much wider implications and KEEP will be relevant to the broad community.

KEEP will also addresses the issues of "safeguarding the original bits from the carrier", getting the files into the emulation platform, and providing online services.

Emulation is seen as a better approach than conversion as it reduces the risk of degradation over time. This can be seen with commercial software in cases where old documents aren't rendered with complete fidelity by newer versions, or where font metrics aren't exactly the same on different platforms.

And given that some cultural artefacts were packaged as applications (eg, multimedia works wrapped up in a runtime player), conversion is not always an option.

Emulation is commonly used as a way of preserving old videogames. One example is MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator).

KEEP project participants are drawn from the Czech Republic, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

According to the BBC , the British Library has estimated that delays due to accessing and preserving old digital files cost European businesses about £2.7 billion (€3 billion) per year.

That puts the €4 million KEEP budget in perspective, doesn't it?