A Case Study for the Emulation Service of Electronic Records

The objective of this research is to show the possibilities of emulation strategy in the long-term preservation for the digital components of Korean public agencies. First, this study analyzed four major emulation projects that were conducted in the world, such as CAMiLEON, KB, Planets and KEEP. Second, it compared the three different emulation approaches, such as device emulation, OS emulation and application emulation. Third, it searched all the digital components that one public agency produced during the last six years. Through the search, this study found out that the HWP and XLS format files comprised around 90% of the files. Fourth, it examined the functionalities of the formats, which may have been lost when the format was converted to PDF/A. Last, this study introduced the two prototype emulators for the National Archives of Korea. One is a type of OS emulator, while the other is a type of application emulator.