Stanford University has large collections of historic software which are currently inaccessible to our researchers. We are also actively collecting software that has been developed by our faculty for classroom use and by authors of digital publications for the Stanford University Press. We are excited by the potential value offered by emulation to expand access and use of our software collections. A distributed community approach to software preservation is advantageous as it increases the use of this resource type, allows for us to engage with software creators early in the software development lifecycle and it shares local expertise of emulation across multiple academic insitutitions.

As we embark on our work as a node host we look forward to learning how our partner institutions select, validate, and publicize their work. Authentication and rights management across institutional boundaries is one area of interest. We are also keen to learn how we can leverage the sharing of software libraries and configuration data.

Read Stanford Statement of Importance