FCoP Cohort Activity
Cohort Documentation
In February, the FCoP cohort participants compiled a list of external resources they have used, consulted, or otherwise employed in their course of their individual FCoP projects. FCoP External Resources reflects the wide range of tasks and responsibilities that are involved throughout the software preservation and emulation process: disk imaging guides, reports on emulation and virtualization, studies dedicated to specific collection types (architectural design records, and music composition records), accounts of curator experiences with born-digital archives, and as much software metadata documentation as you can manage. As a whole, the document serves as a draft bibliography informing the ground-level work in which the FCoP cohort is engaged.
Cohort Projects: Status Reports
University of Virginia
Elsewhere, the University of Virginia has confirmed the date, times, and venue of the Emulation in the Archives Workshop: Thursday, July 18th, 2019, 8:30AM – 4:00PM, at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. More information, including registration and travel scholarship details, can be found on the workshop’s website.
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
The Living Computer Museum + Labs have been doing substantial work with their collections and emulators for Commodore 64 and Windows 98, and Cynde Moya has goals associated with the Xerox Alto emulator (ContrAlto), whose integration into EaaS is still in development.
University of Illinois
University of Illinois has produced good results emulating legacy versions of Sibelius a music score writing program that was first published in 1993. In addition, Tracy Popp at Illinois has made progress documenting file formats in her collections, and the software dependencies associated with those formats.
Cohort Outreach
As a group, the cohort was busy developing outreach ideas to get the word out about their work in the FCoP project. 3 teams are considering 3 different approaches: a panel-style presentation, a workshop, and participating in a more general-audience program. Proposals will be submitted in the next few months, stay tuned for more details!
FCoP Research Travel Award
Speaking of details, Dr. Amelia Acker, recipient of the FCoP Research Travel Award, is making more information public regarding to her research project. Dr. Acker plans to visit three of the FCoP sites: Georgia Tech, University of Virginia, and the Living Computer Museum + Labs. Dr. Acker plans to conduct an empirical investigation into the software preservation contexts at these 3 sites, and ask the following research questions:
- How are software preservation practices applied in different contexts?
- How are the workflows developed and deployed?
- How are initial representative software environments selected and appraised?
- How do these unique environments impact the selection, standards and workflows for ongoing software preservation practices?
With little empirical answers to these questions in the current literature, Dr. Acker hopes to establish a foundation from which future studies can use. The FCoP project team is excited to see how Dr. Acker’s research proceeds!