The economy of free and open source software in the preservation of digital artefacts

Abstract

profit organization that helps the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. She has worked on the Portico digital preservation service, a part of ITHAKA that preserves scholarly literature published in electronic form and ensures that these materials remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students. She is currently engaged with partners at the California Digital Library and Stanford University in developing the next-generation JHOVE2 tool. Her past work includes the design and development of print and electronic publishing systems. She has served as a representative to XML vocabulary standards groups. She received her BA in English Literature from Yale University, her MA in English Literature from Cornell University, and her MS in Computer Science from Rutgers University.

Preserving Software: Motivations, Challenges and Approaches

“…Sometimes we access these artefacts via obsolescent software because we are scholars investigating the 'original experience' of these mediated artefacts. Increasingly, we are accessing them this way because it is the only experience we can have of these artefacts (Cochrane 2012;Morrissey 2010).…”

“…This means assuring preservation of correctly versioned compilers, along with appropriate software and hardware stacks. Even then, we face the problem of understanding, not just the syntax of the programming language used, but the larger coding idioms employed to organize code and communicate its organization and capabilities to human readers (Matthews et al, 2009;Morrissey 2010).…”

Significant Properties as Contextual Metadata

“…The digital curation literature cites a number of different significant characteristics to preserve along with the digital objects over time, such as the functionality, relationships among data, and appearance (Coyne et al, 2007); look and feel (Hedstrom, Lee, Olson, & Lampe, 2006;Matthews et al, 2008) rights information (proprietary algorithms or copyright) (Ashley et al, 2008;Matthews et al, 2008); purpose and use (Ashley et al, 2008); computing environment (Morrissey, 2010); intention of the creator (Coyne et al, 2008); and usage (e.g., Morrissey, 2010). The array of significant properties identified is large and diverse, and researchers in computer science have noted the difficulties inherent in identifying and representing contextual metadata (Buneman, Khanna, & Tan, 2001;Carter & Green, 2009).…”

The characteristics and motivations of library open source software developers: An empirical study

“…First, preservation of digital objects in archives and libraries is a challenge since file formats, hardware, and the software that renders them understandable to users change rapidly (one example of this is the variety formats for sound recordings). OSS licenses allow a reconfiguration of software components that preserve rendering of deprecated file formats (e.g., Morrissey, 2010). A second major initiative for the library community is patron privacy.…”