Wednesday, April 06, 2016

Validating migration via emulation

Validating migration via emulation. Euan Cochrane. Digital Continuity Blog. Apr 07, 2016.
     "Automated migration of content between files of different formats can often lead to content being lost or altered." Verifying the migration of content is mostly a manual process, and when done for a large number of objects it is not-cost effective. A possible way to do this is to automatically migrate to preferred formats as much as possible and give users the option of working with the object in the “original” software as well as an emulation service. The users could look at both the migrated and emulated versions and verify that the migrated object is valid. By involving multiple users, the migrated object becomes a trusted object.

If this were done together with migration or emulation on demand, then validated digital objects could be separately ingested into a digital preservation system and preserved along with the original version. This could reduce the storage of migrated versions by "only preserving 'validated' migrated versions" and also ensure that trusted content was "available and properly preserved". 

No comments: