A Framework for Software Preservation

Abstract

Software preservation has not had detailed consideration as a research topic or in practical application. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework to capture and organise the main notions of software preservation, which are required for a coherent and comprehensive approach. This framework has three main aspects. Firstly a discussion of what it means to preserve software via a performance model which considers how a software artefact can be rebuilt from preserved components and can then be seen to be representative of the original software product. Secondly the development of a model of software artefacts, describing the basic components of all software, loosely based on the FRBR model for representing digital artefacts and their history within a library context. Finally, the definition and categorisation of the properties of software artefacts which are required to ensure that the software product has been adequately preserved. These are broken down into a number of categories and related to the concepts defined in the OAIS standard. We also discuss our experience of recording these preservation properties for a number of BADC software products, which arose from a series of case studies conducted to evaluate the software preservation framework, and also briefly describe the SPEQS toolkit, a tool to capture software preservation properties within a software development.

Towards the digital preservation of DOM-node-keyed scholarly web annotations

“…There have been proposals for ways in which we might preserve such software (Matthews, Shaon, Bicarregui, & Jones, 2010). However, since different browsers, at different points in their development history, can create different DOM trees from different parsing processes, even on the same documents, is it necessary to preserve browsers and operating systems within standardised virtualised containers so that the precise rendering process for annotation attachment at any moment can be reconstructed?…”

Software vs. data in the context of citation

“…That is, software generally performs a function upon something (e.g., software processes data), while data generally has a function performed upon it (e.g., data is processed by software). If we accept the definitions of software and data given at the beginning of this section, then (at least in scientific research), the difference between data and software can be summarized by the statement of Matthews et al (2010): "we are more interested in what software does rather than what software is." Data provides evidence, software provides a tool Software exists to perform a task, while data does not.…”

Collaborating with executable content across space and time

“…The chances of finding compatible hardware and operating system on which to even attempt an install become vanishingly small over time scales of decades. These challenges have long stymied efforts by the digital library community to archive executable content [5][6][7][8].…”