For more information about the project and about emulation, visit their web site. Unlike the strategies above, data migration focuses on maintaining digital material in current formats. At present many libraries and publishers are involved in regular migrations for image files e.g. moving images from one software version to a newer version. The attraction of this strategy is that material is maintained in an accessible format. The two strategies above both advocate storing the material as a bytestream in its original format and then making it accessible when necessary.
Data migration means the material is maintained in the archive in a currently useable format.
For a library this is an important advantage. There are significant disadvantages of this strategy. Sometimes the loss is identifiable and made very clear, and worryingly sometimes it is not. It is this potentially unknown data loss that makes migration somewhat problematic. Refreshing does not imply ensuring the material is kept useable - it is only the transfer of a bytestream from one medium to another.