“Olive is a collaborative project seeking to establish a robust ecosystem for long-term preservation of software, games, and other executable content. Born at Carnegie Mellon University, Olive addresses the current gap in preservation technology by providing a curated environment for the preservation and distribution of executable content.

Goals

• Enable libraries to achieve their mission of preserving the scholarly records
• Provide a platform for preserving, searching, extending, and distributing executable content
• Establish a workflow for this preservation
• Determine the obstacles to preservation and distribution
• Retain executable content in its original state such that end users may interact with it freely

How it Works

• Executable content is preserved in a full virtual machine to ensure long-term compatibility
• Relevant Virtual Machine archives can be discovered using content and metadata searches
• Rights are granted to launch this virtual machine
• Virtual machine is streamed using Internet Suspend/Resume® technology
• Like internet videos, user may begin interacting before full VM is downloaded
• User may save VM changes to their own computer and apply them to subsequent launches”