As Simon, Jean, and others have noted, numerous resources for media preservation persist online, from older sites like DOCAM to newer projects like Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology to portals that try to stay updated like the UK’s Digital Curation Centre. I guess we have to keep citing these to remind everyone they’re still out there.
For my part, I direct the University of Maine’s Digital Curation graduate program, whose curriculum strives to be both forward-looking and practical. For example, this spring I'm co-teaching a course in Digital Preservation, and we dedicate time to both more conventional techniques (like migration and checksums) as well as more experimental ones (like emulation and DNA storage). You can take all the courses online at:
http://DigitalCuration.UMaine.edu
Emulation, I think, is a digital example of the sort of community-developed performative preservation that came up earlier in this discussion. Emulators make new computers "act like" older ones by interpreting vintage code for a modern context, and the vast majority of emulators have been written by amateurs.
In UMaine's digital preservation class we learn how to install, daisy-chain, and evaluate emulators. Thanks to the efforts of folks like Klaus Rechert, Dragan Espenschied, and Jason Scott, you can run some emulators right in your browser, without even installing them. Seeing is believing, so here are two of my favorite free demos:
* Windows 3.1
https://archive.org/details/win3_stock
* CD-ROMs via Mac OS 7
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2015/apr/17/theresa-duncan-cd-roms-are-now-playable-online
Emulation can't solve every problem of hardware obsolescence, but there are interesting projects to emulate (say) CRT screens and vector displays.
Looking back from this perspective at ancient history, it's tempting to think of the Rosetta Stone as the first emulator. But emulators are active programs, and the Rosetta Stone didn't perform any translations itself. It was more of a public crosswalk between languages, which could be used to convert from an arcane language to a vernacular one. The Rosetta Stone was the first API.
jon
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