Preserving digital information an alternative to full emulation

The preservation of digital data for the long term presents variety of challenges from technical to social and organizational. The technical challenge is to ensure that the information, generated today, can survive long term changes in storage media, devices and data formats. This paper presents a novel approach to the problem. It distinguishes between archiving data files and archiving programs (so that their behavior may be reenacted in the future). For data files, a program P is archived, together with the data. P is able to decode the information and return an »understandable« view of the data to the caller. For archiving a program, the proposal consists of saving the original executable object code together with a program P which emulates the functionality of the original computer. In both cases, P is specified as machine language code for a Universal Virtual Computer that is general, yet basic enough as to remain relevant in the future.