Emulation Workbench for Digital Object Format Analysis

As part of on-going research I have recently been working a lot with emulated desktop environments. 

One of the somewhat surprising things to come out of this work has been the realisation that an having a set of emulated desktops with various old applications installed on them (an emulation workbench) is a really valuable tool for digital preservation practitioners. 

When faced with an digital object with an unknown format that DROID, JHOVE etc cannot identify, one of the most useful approaches I have found for discovering the format of the object is to try opening it in a number of applications of roughly the same era.  Often applications will suggest an open-parameter to use when opening a file e.g:

Or they may obviously produce errors when opening a file e.g:

Both of which can be useful for understanding the types of objects you are dealing with. 

Some applications specify explicitly that they are converting an object from one format to another, implying that the application decided that the object was of the first format. 

Admittedly this approach can be time consuming. But if you have a set of files that you think are the same type it may be worthwhile spending the time attempting to open the files in different applications. Also, with some research it may be possible to automate this process so that an object can be automatically opened in a range of applications from it’s era and the results automatically analysed to see which gave the least errors or to analyse the conversion messages provided to see whether all the applications agree on the original format. Jay Gattuso has discussed something similar here.

Given the obsolescence of hardware, and difficulty setting up old hardware, this use-case highlights the need for a set of emulated desktops for digital preservation practitioners to add to their tool-set. Such a tool-set or “workbench” would be extremely helpful for adding to format databases such as Pronom and UDFR.

Comments appreciated via @euanc on twitter