EaaSI Update February-March 2019

  • Seth Anderson

EaaSI Beta Release

During the months of February and March, the EaaSI Project Team put the finishing touches on the beta release of the EaaSI software. In February, team members conducted internal testing of the system. Tests focused on new features of the system, including network metadata synchronization and replication of emulation environments, as well as software and object import workflows, UI improvements, and many ad hoc stress tests. The team at OpenSLX valiantly tackled the various bug reports and finalized installation procedures with time to spare. On March 5, the EaaSI beta was officially released and made available to the first EaaSI Network node partners. Partner institutions are working to install and configure the software by the end of the month. To celebrate this program milestone, and to give our communities more information about the EaaSI Beta, we kicked off a four-week series where each week we take a deeper dive into a major aspect of the beta release including Development, Documentation, Deployment, and Testing. Week 1 highlighted EaaSI Beta’s Development with a post by Klaus Rechert, EaaSI Lead Emulation Architect. Read Klaus’s full post. Keep an eye out on listservs and social media over the next few weeks as for more!

Conference Participation

Amidst all the hard work preparing for the beta release, multiple members of the Project Team attended conferences to spread the word about EaaSI. EaaSI Project PI Euan Cochrane attended the 14th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) in Melbourne, Australia. Using a recently deployed cloud instance of EaaSI, Euan demonstrated the recent updates to the EaaSI software.


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EaaSI Program Manager Seth Anderson attended the 2019 Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) meeting in Mexico City, Mexico. Seth pulled double duty, modering and participating in a panel discussion on software curation, preservation, and access with Daina Bouquin (Head Librarian, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian), Don Brower (Head of Digital Infrastructure, Notre Dame University), and Selina Aragon (Communications Lead, Software Sustainability Institute).


See Software Preservation Network’s other Tweets

Ethan attended the 2019 Code4Lib conference in San Jose, California, where he participated in the conference lightning talks. In under five minutes, Ethan provided an introduction to the project and solicited responses to our software prioritization survey.


See Software Preservation Network’s other Tweets

Community Outreach

The software prioritization survey mentioned above was released by Ethan and EaaSI Communications & Outreach Lead Jessica Meyerson in late February, as a Call for Community Feedback. The EaaSI team wanted to know how community members rank various genre of software genres (Ex. drivers, office productivity). The responses we received inform our configuration priorities and Wikidata record creation.

See Software Preservation Network’s other Tweets

February also saw the the start of our #softwareoftheweek Twitter series. These weekly posts highlight a piece of software, from the EaaSI Network, that have piqued our interest while working on the project. Follow @softwarepreservationnetwork and #eaasi to see future tweets.


See Software Preservation Network’s other Tweets

Also, we have stickers:

Preferred citation:

Anderson, Seth. (2019, March 1). EaaSI Update February-March 2019. Software Preservation Network. https://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/eaasi-update-february-march-2019/