CIRCA:The KEEP Project
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Project Summary
What is KEEP?
KEEP stands for Keeping Emulation Environments Portable and was a project created to facilitate continued access to cultural heritage by developing flexible tools to help access, manipulate and store digital objects. These digital objects would include accurate renderings of static and dynamic text, images, videos, sounds, websites, databases, games and other digital media. The way the digital objects would be accessed, manipulated, and stored would be done through an emulation that mimics the original hardware environment that the digital object was created on.
In addition to the emulation framework being developed, the KEEP project team would also design and develop a Virtual Machine that the emulation framework could be run on. This is so the emulations would operate independently from the computer’s actual software and hardware requirements.
The KEEP project is an important advancement within the field of technology preservation because the most common way to currently preserve media is through migration as technology is rapidly updating and growing. Migration is when a digital object is continually updated to work with current hardware and software developments when the digital object’s original environment becomes obsolete. This is an issue though because every time a digital object is migrated, pieces of information and metadata are lost because they are not compatible with the new environment. With the use of emulation and the virtual machine, accessing digital objects and materials is mediated by making the computer compatible with the materials, and not the other way around. This will allow digital objects to be accessed not in just the present time but also in the future.
Timeline
The KEEP project was a three-year project run between 2009 and 2012. For the first two years, the project team focused on researching the available tools and technology including transfer tools and emulation software. At the same time, with help from the National Libraries of France, Germany, and the Netherlands, the project team also did a user requirements analysis to help design a flexible, and user-friendly emulation service, media carrier, and media transfer tool.
During this research period, the project term also ended up doing an investigation into the potential legal issues that would arise from uploading information from the original data carrier, which later turned into a study. This study created a set of standards about the metadata needed for each of the transferred files and how the legal issues should be approached, using information from European laws.
Funding
Project KEEP was co-funded by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research and technological development (FP7).
People Involved
During the development of the KEEP project, a consortium of organizations were involved internationally to represent a wide variety of stakeholders across Europe. This consortium included:
- The national libraries of France, Germany and the Netherlands
- Tessella, a company that provides services for sorting and preserving data in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands
- Joguin SAS in France
- Software developers specializing in preservation
- Project consultants from CrossCzech in the Czech Republic
- The Computerspielemuseum in Germany
- The University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom
- The European Game Developers Federation
