The CAMiLEON project was a joint undertaking by the University of Michigan

University of Michigan

The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...

 and the University of Leeds

University of Leeds

The University of Leeds is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England...

 to develop and evaluate a range of technical strategies for the long term preservation of digital material

Digital preservation

Digital preservation is the set of processes, activities and management of digital information over time to ensure its long term accessibility. The goal of digital preservation is to preserve materials resulting from digital reformatting, and particularly information that is born-digital with no...

 suffering from digital obsolescence

Digital obsolescence

Digital obsolescence is a situation where a digital resource is no longer readable because the physical media, the reader required to read the media, the hardware, or the software that runs on it, is no longer available. A prime example of this is the BBC Domesday Project...

. The project was funded jointly by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee

Joint Information Systems Committee

JISC is a United Kingdom non-departmental public body whose role is to support post-16 and higher education and research by providing leadership in the use of ICT in learning, teaching, research and administration...

 (JISC) and the US National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

 over a 3-4 year period from 1 October 1999. The UK component of the project was completed on 31 December 2002, the US component finished on 30 September 2003.

The project's first case study was the multimedia BBC Domesday Project

BBC Domesday Project

The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers Ltd, Philips, Logica and the BBC to mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book, an 11th century census of England...

 created by the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 between 1985 and 1986. The BBC published this work on Laser Discs in LVROM format, which can now be read only by a few machines, and there were fears that the data would become unreadable. The method proposed by CAMiLEON to recover the data was to emulate

Emulator

In computing, an emulator is hardware or software or both that duplicates the functions of a first computer system in a different second computer system, so that the behavior of the second system closely resembles the behavior of the first system...

the obsolete hardware using modern equipment. CAMiLEON has successfully produced a system, DomesEm, that emulates the original hardware and allows the discs to be viewed.