Every day we all make choices about our individual digital legacies through what we create, keep, and share. Software mediates all of those activities. The 2020 Software Preservation and Emulation Symposium provided an opportunity to discuss our dependence on software and software as a work and research output of the university in its own right.
Software curation is about:
- ensuring that digital information remains accessible and usable
- planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods
- documenting use cases that require software preservation services
- confronting challenges of media failure and technological change
This year’s Symposium included EaaSI demos of emulation in action for three Stanford use cases including CD-ROMs from the International Monetary Fund, materials from the Robert Stein collection, and a collection from the Stanford University Press.
Facilitators:
- Michael Olson
- Annie Schweikert
Speakers:
- Ron Nakao
- Kris Kasianovitz
- Bob Stein
- Ethan Gates
Event Objectives:
- Demonstrate how members of the Stanford Emulation as a Service team have begun to test emulation as a potential access strategy for a number of different Stanford use cases.
- Identify possible overlaps, intersections, and partnerships that have helped us to think about software curation as a university-wide priority.
- Bring together information technology professionals, archivists, curators, librarians, faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students and others from across Stanford University to share their experiences and contribute their perspectives on software as critical infrastructure and ways to provide long-term access to the software-dependent output of the university.