Fostering the Universal Virtual Computer as Long-Term Preservation Platform

Abstract

The Universal Virtual Computer (UVC) is a simple yet powerful approach to preserve digital objects on a long-term scale. The main idea is to develop tools for the UVC to access encoded objects, thus preserving the accessibility of the digital object. Consisting of only few commands, the UVC allows for an arbitrary amount of segments, registers, and memory. The specification is provided in plain English to allow for a simple implementation of the UVC. Currently, the UVC is only available as proof-of-concept. We gained practical experiences by implementening the UVC on different platforms, as well as by developing tools on top of the UVC. In this paper, we present these experiences which have led to an improved specification of the UVC. In this way, an even simpler implementation of this powerful and comparatively cheap archiving approach becomes possible.