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STACKTRACE // News from Software Preservation Network
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March 2022
Volume 5, Issue 1
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Learn about current SPN-wide efforts—activities that crosscut working groups and affiliated projects.
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Community Engagement Collaborative Updates
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In case you missed it…the recording and materials from the Autumn 2021 SPN Community Forum are now available on the SPN site! This Forum featured a discussion about preservation use cases that have gotten a little less attention than their high-profile multimedia cousins – focusing on data reproducibility and historically-situated software. Our thanks once more to our speakers, Elena Colón-Marrero and Vicky Rampin!
In December, the CEC also hosted an end-of-year holiday social for SPN members! 2021 was tough - another year where we were unable to gather in-person at SPN meetups at conferences. So while Zoom can never replace that fuzzy feeling when you’re in the same room as a fellow SPN member, it was a delight to kick back; put on some preservation-themed tunes; and share some favorite video clips, sites, and songs with colleagues. We hope this was the beginning of a beautiful new SPN tradition!
There’s more where that came from - watch the @SoftPresNetwork Twitter account for more Forums and other events, sponsored by the CEC, in 2022! All are welcome!
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Meet Your New SPN Coordinating Committee!
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We are so pleased to announce the results of the ballot to confirm SPN’s Coordinating Committee for 2022!
Please extend a warm welcome to your new Coordinating Committee members:
- Dianne Dietrich, Cornell University
- Stan Gunn, University of Virginia
- Wendy Hagenmaier, Georgia Tech
- Dan Johnson, University of Notre Dame
- Eric Kaltman, California State University Channel Islands
All SPN members are welcome to contact the Coordinating Committee or bring activities to their attention by emailing the group at spn-coordinat...@educopia.org.
Please join us in congratulating the new Coordinating Committee members! We look forward to their leadership in SPN.
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New Implementation Sponsor: Interlisp.Org
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Interlisp was a software development environment developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970s and 1980s to support research in AI, graphical user interfaces, and Hypertext. The Interlisp project team is working to revive Interlisp and adapt it to be useful in the modern world. Learn more on the SPN website!
As an Implementation Sponsor of Software Preservation Network, Interlisp.Org’s support helps ensure that SPN continues to advance field level capacity for software preservation through community engagement, infrastructure support, and knowledge generation. We are grateful for Interlisp.Org’s contribution and its efforts to preserve an essential piece of software heritage. You can read more about Interlisp and even test an in-progress rebuild of the Medley Interlisp software here: https://interlisp.org/
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Training & Education Tagging Party Recap
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The Training & Education Working Group kicked off the year with a Software Preservation Resource Tagging Party on January 18. Led by Morgan McKeehan, a group of classification-curious volunteers came together to apply tags to SPN resources that will improve their discoverability. Enhanced tags will also provide the web content structure needed for future Training & Education efforts to build curriculum pathways for different types of software preservation, varying skill levels, and roles within the software lifecycle on the SPN website.
It was a great way for community members to learn more about what resources are available on the SPN site including:
- Legal Issues & Copyright
- SPN Projects like the Fostering a Community of Practice Initiative
- Metadata for Software Preservation
- Specialized Preservation needs for Research software, Time-based media, & Games
This project is still in progress with website updates rolling out later this year, so look out for future opportunities to join a tagging party, or join the SPN Training & Education Working Group to help out.
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In February the SPN Metadata Working Group was pleased to version 1.0.0 of the Software Metadata Recommended Format (SMRF) Guide! This long-awaited document gives libraries, museums, archives and repository managers guidance on descriptive practice for software materials. Taking recommendations and feedback from across SPN, the working group has defined and summarized a number of metadata elements for a functional yet adaptable framework, along with crosswalks to MARC, Dublin Core, MODS, Wikidata, and CodeMeta.
The full guide is now available on the SPN site. But it is also the working group’s intention to revisit the SMRF Guide periodically based on the community’s comments. If you would like to leave feedback, please use this Google Form, and the working group will include your thoughts in their review and potentially incorporate them into future iterations of the Guide!
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Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents
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The SPN Training & Education Working Group maintains a thorough public Zotero library of web sites and publications related to software preservation. To highlight this and other extremely helpful communal resources on the SPN site, the Community Engagement Collaborative is asking individual SPN members to pick out a particular resource that’s been important to their work!
Written by: Dianne Dietrich, Digital Assets Librarian, Cornell University Library
Resource cited in the bibliography: Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents, Scientific American Vol. 272, No. 1 (JANUARY 1995)
 I wish I could remember the first time I encountered Jeff Rothenberg’s, “Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents,” originally published in Scientific American in January 1995. It’s interesting to consider the scenario Rothenberg lays out at the start of the article: it’s 2045, and his theoretical grandchildren are trying to decipher how to obtain his fortune, which is all spelled out on a CD-ROM. Astoundingly, in 2022, we are now closer to 2045 than we are to 1995. To put Rothenberg’s scenario into some historical context, he wasn’t talking about data on a CD-R (or even CD-RW): it wasn’t until nine months after his article was published that the first CD burner drive was available to consumers for just less than $1,000 – just a few years earlier, you’d have to pay upwards of $10,000 for one. And the CD-ROM he’s referring to? It would likely be commercially pressed, and even if we put aside what it means for that to be the case, is possibly still readable today. (That is, if you can scrounge up your old USB optical drive.) The files contained on it? That’s debatable, but there are some formats from the 1990s that are still understandable today.
What’s fascinating about this article, historical meanderings aside, is how much of it holds up, as we hurtle towards 2045. Rothenberg writes, “we must save the programs that generate our digital documents, as well as all the system software required to run those programs … [S]oftware engineers can write programs called emulators, which … should be able to emulate obsolete systems on demand.” All of the considerations and concerns he expresses about the durability of electronic information, at every layer, are issues archivists are grappling with today, which is simultaneously chilling and comforting. Either way, it sounds like we should continue the good work of preserving software. As for me? Well, I’m off to remember where I left an important note to myself on a floppy disk.
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No Break for Law & Policy
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If Law & Policy were looking for a respite from a hyperactive summer, they didn’t get it in the last six months:
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In September, with approval from the L&P Working Group and Coordinating Committee, SPN submitted a letter to President Biden in support of a broad waiver of global intellectual property enforcement regimes in response to the COVID pandemic. SPN joined a collection of public interest groups who signed on in support of the statement, which was meant to encourage including copyright along with patent among the rights that would be waived or modified to ensure a swift and effective response to the pandemic. You can read the letter here!
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In October, SPN submitted comments to the U.S. Copyright Office on proposed regulations for small claims procedures for libraries and archives. The TL;DR version: a new law passed earlier this year called the CASE Act makes it easier to bring copyright infringement lawsuits in a new so-called “small claims” court located in the Copyright Office, and the Copyright Office is currently proposing rules to implement that law. The rules could shape whether and how libraries and librarians are subject to litigation over alleged infringement. Specifically, this rulemaking is about the scope of a provision in the law that allows libraries and archives to “preemptively opt out” of all copyright suits that would be brought under this new arrangement. The Copyright Office is proposing to enable libraries and archives to opt out as institutions, but to leave individual employees subject to lawsuits for their actions in the course of their employment. Our comment points out that this is a bizarre and self-defeating implementation of the statute that will leave libraries and archives very much on the hook in this small-claims court, despite the obvious legislative intent to let them opt out. You can read the full text of the comment on the SPN site.
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In February, SPN filed an amicus brief in Apple v. Corellium, the ongoing lawsuit asking whether fair use protects research access to software in emulated environments. Though a trial court sided with emulation platform Corellium last year, Apple is appealing and the suit currently sits in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. The case could have serious implications for digital cultural heritage preservation; you can read more on the SPN blog, including the full text of the brief, and SPN Law & Policy Advisor Brandon Butler wrote a further post on the case for Harvard’s Fair Use Week.
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L&P are also continuing to work on a couple of short guides to the non-fair use provisions in US and Canadian law that permit libraries and archives to preserve and provide access to their collections. These provisions were generally written with traditional textual materials in mind, so their application to software requires some analysis, which we attempt to do. The preprint version of the US law portion has been posted to ArXiv and the working group still welcomes feedback on it!
Last but not least, Law & Policy is looking (way) ahead to the next DMCA rulemaking cycle and starting to gather evidence necessary to request remote access to video games (again - and win this time)! The Working Group is seeking volunteers to carry out or locate research on the video game reissue market to support their efforts and help sway the Copyright Office in 2024. A key point of contention, and an argument that seemed to sway the Copyright Office against SPN in the past cycle, was the video game industry’s claim that there is a thriving market for reissued games, and that remote access to research collections that include old video games could harm their reissue market. If this topic is of interest to you, or matches your existing research agenda, or is just something you’d like to learn more about - please contact Phil Salvador (ph...@gamehistory.org) at the Video Game History Foundation!
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Recordings and Resources Now Available from Autumn 2021 Forum
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The SPN Community Engagement Collaborative is delighted to announce that recordings for the Autumn 2021 Software Preservation Community Forum are now available on our website!
The September 2021 Community Forum featured a discussion about preservation use cases that have gotten a little less attention than their high profile multimedia cousins – focusing on data reproducibility and historically-situated software.
As a subscriber to to the Software Preservation Network listserv, you will receive reminders, calendar invites, and call-in information for the QCF via email.
If you are interested in discussing a specific topic during future Community Forums, submit your topics and questions via Google form.
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Learn about SPN affiliated project activities and milestones. SPN affiliated projects focus on specific aspects of software preservation/curation that support the strategic goals of SPN.
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Funder(s): Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Awardee: Yale University
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Yes, Virginia, there will be an EaaSI Phase 3! The Mellon and Sloan foundations invited our program of work to submit for a third round of funding, and a draft proposal has been turned in for their consideration. Unfortunately that is about all the detail we can share at this time, but please keep an eye peeled on the Project Announcements section of the EaaSI Community Forum for more information on our goals and timeline as we start sharing more in the coming weeks!
Platform Release v2021.10
Last-minute quality assurance pushed our official release date to December, but the team was proud to sign, seal and deliver v2021.10 of the open-source EaaSI stack! This was an enormous leap from the previous release - v2020.03 - that resolved over 600 tickets in our GitLab tracker and included many under-the-hood adjustments and improvements, particularly to stabilize and deliver on the promise of the new-look “EaaSI UI”. Huge kudos to our amazing dev teams at OpenSLX and Dual Lab!
You can check out the full release notes for v2021.10 here, and as always you can consult the EaaSI User Handbook for step-by-step instructions to set up an EaaSI server of your very own.
AusEaaSI
We are also totally thrilled that our colleagues at the Swinburne University of Technology, led by Prof. Melanie Swalwell, have been funded by the Australian Research Council to establish an Australian-based EaaSI network of GLAM organizations and university archives, with support from AARNet. This will follow on the incredible work on access-via-emulation that the same team has led in the ongoing “Play It Again” and “Archiving Australian Media Arts” projects. Congratulations!!!
The EaaSI teams at Yale and OpenSLX are partnered to support “AusEaaSI” as able and we look forward to working together to continue pushing shared emulation services across the globe. (Speakers from all sides were featured at the Play It Again project’s incredible “Born Digital Cultural Heritage Conference” - check out all of their recordings for just a taste of what’s to come!)
Training Module #5: Disk Images
Everyone’s talking about them, and EaaSI’s no different: disk images play a critical role in our platform functionality and how emulation intersects with digital collections. If you want to learn more, check out the most recent in our series of EaaSI Training Modules!
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The Software Preservation Network (SPN) facilitates and supports software preservation efforts. SPN preserves software through community engagement, infrastructure support, and knowledge generation in five core activity areas including Community Engagement, Law & Policy, Metadata, Training & Education, Research-in-Practice, and Technological Infrastructure.
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Do you appreciate the work that SPN has been doing over the last several years to ignite software preservation efforts and ensure lawful preservation, sharing, and reuse of software? Would you like SPN to continue its work of coordination, research, advocacy, and capacity building? Do you have ideas or a vision for the future of software preservation that you would like to see realized through the SPN community?
If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, then consider supporting our work through membership, sponsorship, or volunteering. To learn more about the benefits of membership and sponsorship, visit: https://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/get-involved/. To join, please download, complete, and submit your SPN Participation Agreement to <jess.f...@educopia.org>.
Anyone may volunteer on our Community Engagement Collaborative or our core activity working groups: Training & Education, Metadata, Law & Policy, Research in Practice, Technological Infrastructure. You do not need to be a SPN member to join a working group! To join a Working Group, fill out the new volunteer form.
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