development Role of IBM Raymond A. Lorie, during his employment at IBM Research Centre Almaden, initiated the development of a UVC-based solution to long-term digital preservation. He describes the approach as ‘Universal’ because its definition is so basic that it will endure forever, ‘Virtual’ because it will never have to be physically built and it is a ‘Computer’ in its functionality. IBM (NL), the asset owner of the UVC, continues to develop the UVC concept within the PLANETS project. Raymond van Diessen is responsible for extending the application of the UVC concept to preserve more complex objects. Role of the National Library of the Netherlands The National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KB) played a major role in demonstrating that emulation based on the UVC concept is a viable option for long-term digital preservation. In 2000, the emulation advocate, Jeff Rothenberg participated in a study with the KB to test and evaluate the feasibility of using emulation as a long-term preserving strategy. His method was to use software emulation to reproduce the behaviour of obsolete computing platforms on newer platforms offering a way of running a digital document’s original software in the far future, thereby recreating the content, behaviour, and ‘look and feel’ of the original document. Rothenberg was criticized for trying to preserve the wrong thing by suggesting to emulate the behavior of old hardware platforms and operating systems to access the original data through the original software program associated with it. Raymond A. Lorie recognized the difficulties in trying to create a program to emulate a 'real' machine on a future platform and realised that this approach was overkill for the purpose of preserving digital objects. Instead he introduced a novel approach of data/program archiving using a ‘Universal Virtual Computer’. The concept of the UVC-based preservation strategy was implemented by the KB and tested on PDF files as part of a KB/IBM ‘Long Term Preservation’ (LTP) study. Creating a UVC for PDF documents is more complex. Instead the KB decided on developing a UVC for images because this approach would also cover PDF documents (a PDF file can easily be converted to a series of images). The UVC-based approach resulted in the UVC as one of the permanent access tools for JPEG/GIF87 images within the Preservation Subsystem of the KB’s e-Depot. Following the successful implementation of the UVC, the KB has continued to develop their emulation strategy