The field of digital preservation is rapidly evolving beyond the storage of static PDF and TIFF files. As institutions look toward the future, there is an increasing need to develop robust workflows for preserving interactive web-based artifacts, including early HTML5 and legacy Flash-based applications that represent a significant era of internet culture.
Current preservation strategies within Rosetta excel at handling complex document structures, but we believe there is an opportunity to enhance support for emulated web environments. Preserving the "look and feel" of the early 21st-century internet is crucial for future social historians. For example, researchers studying the evolution of digital leisure and subcultural bypass techniques might find it valuable to analyze the structure and metadata of an Unblocked Games portal to understand how these platforms adapted to increasingly restrictive institutional firewalls over the last decade.
To achieve this level of preservation, Rosetta would benefit from improved integration with web archiving tools (like WAIL or Webrecorder) and more granular metadata schema for interactive software assets. Specifically, we suggest:
Enhancing technical metadata extraction for bundled JavaScript and WebGL assets to ensure long-term bitstream integrity.
Developing specialized validation rules for interactive web objects that rely on external dependencies or legacy browser environments.
Improving the delivery of these preserved assets through integrated emulation-as-a-service (EaaS) within the Rosetta delivery framework.
By expanding our scope to include these popular but ephemeral digital spaces, we can ensure that Rosetta remains at the forefront of preserving the full spectrum of our digital cultural heritage for future generations of scholars and researchers.