EaaSI at Home
EaaSI staff have had to adjust as we, our home institutions, and our project partners all look to put the safety of our communities above all. We are fortunate that our distributed team very quickly transitioned to checking in and supporting each other and our network entirely remotely.
As with so many other events, our planned series of local symposia at node hosts will be postponed indefinitely, until such time as everyone is able to safely and comfortably reconvene with their colleagues. In the meantime, we’re working closely with our node partners to create and deliver new online resources and remote training. We always planned on making EaaSI accessible to as many new users as possible, and the challenges ahead for access to digital collections have motivated us to move up and redouble those efforts. Stay tuned!
Reflecting On Our Mission
The current global crisis has underscored how software has become absolutely critical social infrastructure – in ways we may not have even expected or been prepared to discuss a month or two ago. We’ll have time to figure out the ramifications for the work of digital and software archivists in the future. But for now, our number one priority is and should be turning a community of practice into a community of care.
In mid-February, we were lucky to co-sponsor and lead (with our FCoP friends!) a workshop on emulation and software preservation for Research Data Management at the International Digital Curation Conference in Dublin. Our Software Preservation Analyst, Ethan Gates, Tracy Popp from University of Illinois, and Lauren Work from University of Virginia (with enormous design and logistic support from Monique Lassere of University of Arizona and Jessica Meyerson) spent the day in conversation with data curators, creators, practitioners and scholars from across the world. We couldn’t have expected that might be our last chance for some time to be together in that way, but even without that hindsight, the ideas, knowledge, and dedication on display from everyone in that room was inspiring. We will do all we can to support the people in that room, all those who rely on us, and each other.
Node Host Reflections
Continuing our Node Host Reflections Blog series, the Node Host team at Carnegie Mellon writes about building interdisciplinary teams for programmatic software preservation, collaborating with architectural faculty on bringing emulation to the classroom, and tensions between current descriptive practice and metadata requirements for enabling software reuse.
The University of Virginia Node Host team reflects on their parallel involvement in both the FCoP and EaaSI cohorts, mapping the software curation ecosystem for the February IDCC workshop, and the role of existing services (such as APTrust) in providing access to emulation environments.
