UVC-based Preservation

UVC-based preservation is a viable strategy to ensure digital preservation on a technical level. A Universal Virtual Computer (UVC) is a virtual machine (VM) specially designed for preservation of digital objects such as held by libraries, archives and institutions alike. The method is based on emulation but does not require hardware or full emulation. Instead the concept uniquely combines emulation and migration. It offers emulation in the sense that it aims at resembling the original data format. It is also conversion in the way that a translation is made by a conversion program, capable of decoding the original form of the data into a universal technology-independent format similar to XML.