Over the past couple of months, I’ve been chipping away at my NDSR project, and I figure it is time to give an explicit update on my progress.
First, I’ve got a working Apple II and I’ve been running interactive tutorial software on it. Being that I’m not a medical doctor, I’ve failed every tutorial – apparently I have no idea how hyperthermia works. But the other librarians and I have had fun competing anyway. Below, you’ll see our current reigning champion:
Next, I’m nearing a completed version of my white paper on the current status of software preservation. While the paper is available to the NLM community for comment, it will not be publicly available until comments have been received and considered. So, you can look forward to that!
I presented a poster at iPRES 2015 and had a wonderful time doing so. The conference was incredibly informative, and I enjoyed being able to contribute. Here, you’ll find an image of the poster I presented. If you have any questions about it, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Finally, I’m preparing a presentation at NLM to show off some of the materials we’ve acquired in the project so far (including RFP’s from the 1960’s, legacy software, and educational materials from the 1970’s forward). For the presentation, I also prepared a list of suggested further reading and other projects to check out. While some of the articles are more in-depth than others, I think many of these links will be of interest to a wider audience. So, please, take a peak:
Articles, Research Reports, and Recorded Lectures
- Preserving Virtual Worlds, 2010 study on preserving interactive media from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Preserving.exe: Towards a National Strategy for Preserving Software, 2013 Library of Congress meeting on software preservation.
- The Significant Properties of Software: A Study, 2008 paper by Brian Matthews, Brian McIlwrath, David Giarette, and Esther Conway
- Stephen Kind’s Wang: The Literary History of Word Processing, lecture at NYPL organized by NYPL Labs
- Technology Experiments in Art: Conserving Software-Based Artworks. Includes the following lectures:
- Deena Engel & Mark Hellar, “Technical Narratives and Software-Based Artworks.”
- Matthew Kirschenbaum, “The Afterlives of AGRIPPA: Preserving a Disappearing Digital Text.”
- Alex Cooper, “Acquisition and Conservation of Generative Artworks at the National Portrait Gallery.”
- Lincoln Shatz & James Murray, “It will fail and become obsolete.”
- Diane Dietrich & Desiree Alexander, “The Rose Glodsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University
- Aaron Straup, “Planetary: collecting and preserving code as a living object.”
- Software Curation as a Digital Preservation Service, 2015 talk on the use of The Olive Archive and EaaS in university libraries
- Collecting Software, A New Challenge for Archives & Museums, 1987 article by David Bearman
- The Development of the Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS), 2007 article by Cheryl Rae Dee on the history of MEDLARS at NLM
- Empirical Evaluation of Metadata for video games and interactive media, 2015 article by Jin Ha Lee, Rachel Ivy Clarke, and Andrew Petri
- Preserving and Curating Software, short informative blog post by Scott Wildon and originally published by the Software Sustainability Institute.
- Source Code Analysis as Technical Art History, 2015 article by Deena Engel and Glenn Wharton
On Going Projects
- Olive Executable Archive, ongoing research project on emulation and software preservation at Carnegie Mellon University
- Currently in testing at Stanford University Libraries
- EaaS: Emulation as a Service, ongoing project on emulation at the University of Frieburg
- Currently in use at Yale University Libraries
- Video Game Play Capture Project at The Strong National Museum of Play
- Recomputation.Org, project for the University of St. Andrews that works to preserve software in order to ensure the ability to recompute computational science experiments over at least a 20 year period
- Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL), project for the University of Maryland that registers academic source code from Astrophysicists and provides unique ID’s for citation; working on the possibility of archiving the code as well
Super Fun Online Examples
- Theresa Duncan CD-ROMS, project from Rhizome that makes interactive CD-ROMS from the artist Theresa Duncan available online through Eaas.
- Ageny Ruby, early web AI by Lynn Hershman Lesson commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of a larger art project on computers and romance, including the film Teknolust
- The Internet Archive’s Software Collection, includes early games as well as other types of software run through an emulation (JSMESS)
