UVC-based preservation is an archival strategy for handling the preservation of digital objects. It employs the use of a Universal Virtual Computer (UVC)—a virtual machine (VM) specifically designed for archival purposes, that allows both emulation and migration to a language-neutral format like XML. Background to the development of a UVC approach Digital preservation problem Preservation of digital resources is of a paramount importance for deposit libraries, research libraries, archives, government agencies, and actually most organizations. The dominant approach to digital preservation is migration. Migration entails making periodic transformations of archived information into new logical formats as their native formats, or the software or hardware on which they depend becomes obsolete. The notable danger of migration is data loss, and possible loss of original functionality or the ‘look and feel’ of the original format. Furthermore, digital migrations are time consuming and costly as the process requires converting the format of every document, in addition to copying converted bit streams to new media as necessary. Emulation theory Jeff Rothenberg caused a bit of stir in organizations concerned and responsible for digital preservation with his report in 1999: "Avoiding technological quicksand: Finding a viable technical foundation for digital preservation". He states that there are no viable solutions to ensure that digital information will be readable in the future. The proposed solutions of relying on standards and migrations are labeled time consuming and ultimately incapable of preserving digital documents in their original form. He suggests: "an ideal approach should provide a single, extensible, long-term solution that can be designed once and for all and applied uniformly, automatically, and in synchrony (for example, at every future refresh cycle) to all types of documents and all media, with minimal human intervention." He proposes that the best way to satisfy the above criteria is Emulation by; developing an emulator that will run on unknown future computers; developing techniques to capture the metadata needed to find, access and recreate the document; developing techniques for encapsulating documents, their attendant metadata, software, and emulator specifications. In 2000, he suggests implementing an emulation-based preservation approach in which emulator specification are expressed as programs and interpreted by an emulator specification interpreter program written for an emulation virtual machine. Rothenberg's approach was met with skepticism and considered too technically challenging, too expensive and too time consuming, and therefore an economic risk (without the support of empirical evidence). (See further reading section) UVC concept