(Dressler, 2010, paraphrased) Emulation is held in the work of Oltmans and Kol to be "more cost-effective for preserving large collections, despite the relatively high initial cots for developing an emulation device." (Dressler, 2010, p.1)
Emulation is contrasted to migration in that migration is applicable to all the objects in a collection respectively, creating high ongoing costs" whereas emulation chaining for the future is likely to detract from this. Emulation can be implemented "at a higher level than the migration approach" therefore, instead of the development of conversion solutions per format "institutions can develop emulation solutions per environment." (Dressler, 2010, p.1) Emulation has not been used widely in preserving over the long-term and there is a need for tests of practicality prior to conclusions being made about the reliability of emulation. Additionally, as noted by Dressler (2010) the selection of emulation strategy ultimately requires "buying into a migration strategy because emulators themselves become obsolete" making the replacement of the old emulator with a new emulator a requirement or alternatively requiring that a new emulator be created. The work of Rothenberg reports that migration is: (1) labor intensive; (2) time-consuming; (3) expensive; (4) error-prone; (5) risky; and (6) non-scalable and as well that migration makes a requirement of new solution for every new format. (in: Granger, 2000, p.1) Granger (2000) states of migration that it "has been the only serious candidate thus far for preservation of large scale archives" and that not all of these will be valid "with equal force all of the time, with migration many of these claims will vary on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, one has to ask, 'Labor intensive, expensive, etc.,' compared with what?" (Granger, 2000, p.1) Granger states that the ideal approach would be one offering alternatives "for levels of safety and quality, volume of storage, ease of access, and other attributes at varying cots, and it should allow these alternatives to be changed for a given document, type of document, or corpus at any time in the future." ( ) in addition access to all documents should involve only one step...
It should offer up-front acceptance testing at accession time, to demonstrate that a given document will be accessible in the future." (Granger, 2000, p.1) it is noted in one study that emulation is very expensive and requires a high level of expertise. In addition, reported are issues of intellectual property and copyright. A cost comparison of migration and emulation, migration is more cost effective since it involves moving electronic files from one application to another whereas emulation requires the design of software and many times requires design of hardware to mimic operating systems
Summary and Conclusion
Having compared the advantages and disadvantages associated with migration of digital data vs. emulation of digital data, it is the conclusion of this study that migration of digital data is a more viable solution due to the lower requirements of expertise for migration and due to the lower costs associated with the process of migration.
Bibliography
An Introduction to Digital Preservation (2010) JISC Digital Preservation. Retrieved from: http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/guide/an-introduction-to-digital-preservation
Continued Access to Authentic Digital Asses (2013) Digital Preservation Briefing Paper. JISC. Retrieved from: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/briefingpapers/2006/pub_digipreservationbp.aspx
Digital Preservation Costs -- Migration vs. Emulation (2005) Free Government Information (FGI) Retrieved from: http://freegovinfo.info/node/50
Granger, S. (2000) Emulation as a Digital Preservation Strategy. D-Lib Magazine Vol. 6 No. 10, Oct 2000. Retrieved from: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/granger/10granger.html
Week 5: Migration vs. Emulation (2013) Digital Archiving Matters. Weekly Exercises. Retrieved from: http://digitalarchivingmatters.wordpress.com/2013/02/06/week-5-migration-vs.-emulation/
