III: Small: Assisted Emulation for Digital Preservation

在过去的20年里，CD-ROM一直是传播重要的经济、科学、环境和社会数据以及教育和学术工作的主要媒介。出版了15万多本书，其中包括美国和其他国家政府发行的数千本。然而，没有制定可行的战略来确保这些材料将提供给后代的学者。从短期来看，这些材料会发生物理退化，最终无法阅读，从长期来看，技术过时将使其内容无法使用。本项目将利用现有的模拟器和虚拟化软件开发实用技术，以确保光盘材料的长期可行性。虽然仿真作为一种保存策略被广泛讨论，但它有一个根本性的缺陷，因为未来的用户不太可能熟悉遗留软件环境，并且会发现这些软件越来越难以使用。此外，许多这类材料的用户群体稀少且分散，因此图书馆的读者不可能获得任何必要的技术知识。该项目的主要目标是开发必要的技术和流程，以减轻这些缺陷，并使图书馆和档案馆能够大规模部署仿真。该项目将开发自动化技术，以获取必要的技术知识，以便以脚本的形式安装和执行与传统CD-ROM材料的共同操作，以执行通用”仿真环境的动态定制“。长远的设想是支持由图书馆社区开发的分布式光盘收藏，使客户工作站能够通过定制的模拟环境访问保存的光盘图像。该项目将探讨开发自动化使用特定光盘所需脚本的成本，以及使图书馆能够集中资源建立一个保存光盘材料的分布式网络所需的技术。该项目是一个为期两年的试点研究，将开发自动化工具，将这些工具应用于一个大型（几千套代表性的光盘材料，评估这一方法在分布式环境中的性能，将工具和脚本作为软件工件传播，并为规划大规模保存光盘材料提供统计数据。本提案中进行的研究将使图书馆和档案馆能够解决日益严重的问题，同时减少维护可移动媒体收藏所需的资源。该项目提供了一个基础，图书馆和档案馆，以汇集他们的智力资源，提供访问虚拟媒体收藏通过共享模拟器访问使用社区生成的脚本。该项目将使其得以保存的材料包括美国和其他国家政府出版的重要科学和社会数据，以及来自许多来源的文化和教育材料。该项目将对本科生科学教育产生重大影响，直接指导本科生研究助理，并为他们参与写作和提交学术著作提供机会。

For the past 20 years, CD-ROMs have been the primary media for distributing key economic, scientifi c, environmental, and societal data as well as educational and scholarly work. More than 150,000 titles have been published including thousands distributed by the United States and other governments. Yet no viable strategy has been developed to ensure that these materials will be accessible to future generations of scholars. In the short term, these materials are subject to physical degradation which will make them ultimately unreadable and, in the long-term, technological obsolescence will make their contents unusable. This project will develop practical techniques using off-the-shelf emulators with virtualization software to ensure long-term viability of CD-ROM materials. Although emulation has been widely discussed as a preservation strategy, it suffers from a fundamental flaw, since future users are unlikely to be familiar with legacy software environments and will find such software increasingly difficult to use. Furthermore the user communities of many such materials are sparse and distributed, thus any necessary technical knowledge is unlikely to be available to library patrons. The key objective of this project is to develop the technology and processes necessary to mitigate these flaws and to enable large-scale deployment of emulation by libraries and archives.This project will develop automation technologies to capture the technical knowledge necessary to install and perform common actions with legacy CD-ROM materials in the form of scripts for performing on-the-fly customization of \generic" emulation environments. The long-term vision is to support a distributed CD-ROM collection, developed by a community of libraries, which enables client workstations to access preserved CD-ROM images through customized emulation environments. The project will explore the costs of developing the scripts necessary to automate the use of specific CD-ROMs and the technologies necessary to enable libraries to pool their resources to create a distributed network preserved CD-ROM materials.The project is structured as a two-year pilot study that will develop automation tools, apply these tools to a large (several thousand representative set of CD-ROM materials, evaluate the performance of this approach in a distributed environment, disseminate the tools and scripts as software artifacts, and provide statistics for planning the large-scale preservation of CD-ROM materials. The research performed in this proposal will enable libraries and archives to solve a growing problem while reducing the resources required to maintain their collections of removable media. This project provides a foundation for libraries and archives to pool their intellectual resources by providing access to virtual media collections accessed through shared emulators using community generated scripts. The materials whose preservation will be enabled by this project include key scientific and societal data published by United States and other governments as well as cultural and educational materials from many sources. This project will have a significant impact on undergraduate science education by direct mentoring of undergraduate research assistants and providing the opportunity for their involvement in writing and presenting scholarly works.