The Software Preservation Network (SPN): A Community Effort to Ensure Long Term Access to Digital Cultural Heritage

Meyerson, Jessica; Vowell, Zac; Hagenmaier, Wendy; Leventhal, Aliza; Roke, Elizabeth Russey; Rios, Fernando; Walsh, Tim

doi:10.1045/may2017-meyerson

Cited by 7 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…This highlights the need for more communal best practices to get projects started on the right foot, as well as the infrastructure to be able to interact with code and scholarly ephemera to understand it in the long-term. The Software Preservation Network (SPN) has been an impactful contributor when it comes to raising awareness regarding software, and has made some major contributions to the software preservation landscape [39]. SPN affiliated projects-such as Best Practices in Fair Use for Software Preservation, Fostering Communities of Practice: Software Preservation and Emulation in Libraries, Archives and Museums (FCoP), and Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure (EaaSI)-have contributed not only to the technological and legal infrastructures needed for software preservation and reuse, but also helped to formalize software preservation and software emulation roles in GLAM sectors.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Behavioral Approach to Understanding the Git Experience

Milliken¹,

Nguyễn²,

Steeves³

2021

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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The Investigating and Archiving the Scholarly Git Experience (IASGE) project is multi-track study focused on understanding the uses of Git by students, faculty, and staff working in academic research institutions as well as the ways source code repositories and their associated contextual ephemera can be better preserved. This research, in turn, has implications regarding how to support Git in the scholarly process, how version control systems contribute to reproducibility, and how Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals can support Git through instruction and sustainability efforts. In this paper, we focus on a subset of our larger project and take a deep look at what code hosting platforms offer researchers in terms of productivity and collaboration. For this portion, a survey, focus groups, and user experience interviews were conducted to gain an understanding of how and why scholarly researchers use Version Control Systems (VCS) as well as some of the pain points in learning and using VCS for daily work.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Behavioral Approach to Understanding the Git Experience

Milliken¹,

Nguyễn²,

Steeves³

2021

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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“…At present, there are a number of initiatives focused on addressing the preservation and reproducibility of software. In the United States, the Software Preservation Network (SPN) (Meyerson et al, 2017) represents an effort to coordinate efforts to ensure the long-term access to software. The focus of SPN is generally on cultural heritage software rather than research software, but their work delineating issues related to metadata, governance, and technical infrastructure has substantial overlap with what is required for research software.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards computational reproducibility: researcher perspectives on the use and sharing of software

AlNoamany

Borghi

2018

PeerJ Computer Science

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Research software, which includes both source code and executables used as part of the research process, presents a significant challenge for efforts aimed at ensuring reproducibility. In order to inform such efforts, we conducted a survey to better understand the characteristics of research software as well as how it is created, used, and shared by researchers. Based on the responses of 215 participants, representing a range of research disciplines, we found that researchers create, use, and share software in a wide variety of forms for a wide variety of purposes, including data collection, data analysis, data visualization, data cleaning and organization, and automation. More participants indicated that they use open source software than commercial software. While a relatively small number of programming languages (e.g., Python, R, JavaScript, C++, MATLAB) are used by a large number, there is a long tail of languages used by relatively few. Between-group comparisons revealed that significantly more participants from computer science write source code and create executables than participants from other disciplines. Differences between researchers from computer science and other disciplines related to the knowledge of best practices of software creation and sharing were not statistically significant. While many participants indicated that they draw a distinction between the sharing and preservation of software, related practices and perceptions were often not aligned with those of the broader scholarly communications community.

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“…On par with documentation, the topic of collaboration arises in nearly a third of the reviewed articles. This includes recommendations to improve communication and increase collaboration between the academic community, industry and heritage institutions (Barwick, Dearnley, and Muir 2011), and maintaining a relationship with legal advisors and "the software publishing community" (Meyerson et al 2017). Additionally, the studies on the preservation of digital games also emphasised the need to work with those who are already preserving software as a hobby or personal project, and to involve these people in preservation projects and provide them with education and resources where possible (Monnens et al 2009;Takhteyev and DuPont 2013).…”

Section: Recommendations For Preservation In the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several articles call for guidance on legal issues, so this theme was prevalent enough to warrant its own category. Meyerson et al (2017), for instance, describes the ongoing collaboration with Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic and their hope to "develop publicfacing information sheets directed towards a practitioner audience, that provide overviews of legal topics relevant to software preservation". In the area of news preservation, recommendations include "succession agreements" (McCain 2015, 346), "storing copyright and/or licensing information alongside news apps" (Broussard 2015a, 308) and "further work on establishing a legal pathway to the preservation of news apps" (Boss and Broussard 2017, 153).…”

Section: Recommendations For Preservation In the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…For these reasons, digital archivists believe that to save dynamic content such as data journalism for the long term, we must emulate, not migrate, the object in its computational environment. Boss 2018, 1209) Studies which recommend migration cover software preservation (Rios 2016), game preservation (Monnens et al 2009), general software preservation (Meyerson et al 2017), the preservation of automatic test equipment (Dunn 2005) and of software relating to business processes (Barateiro et al 2012). However, none of these studies specifically discuss migration as a recommendation for the preservation of news media-related objects.…”

Section: Recommendations For Preservation In the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

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Preserving Data Journalism: A Systematic Literature Review

Heravi

Cassidy²,

Davis

et al. 2021

Journalism Practice

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News organisations have longstanding practices for archiving and preserving their content. The emerging practice of data journalism has led to the creation of complex new outputs, including dynamic data visualisations that rely on distributed digital infrastructures. Traditional news archiving does not yet have systems in place for preserving these outputs, which means that we risk losing this crucial part of reporting and news history. Following a systematic approach to studying the literature in this area, this paper provides a set of recommendations to address lacunae in the literature. This paper contributes to the field by (1) providing a systematic study of the literature in the fields, (2) providing a set of recommendations for the adoption of long-term preservation of dynamic data visualisations as part of the news publication workflow, and (3) identifying concrete actions that data journalists can take immediately to ensure that these visualisations are not lost.

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The Software Preservation Network (SPN): A Community Effort to Ensure Long Term Access to Digital Cultural Heritage

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

A Behavioral Approach to Understanding the Git Experience

A Behavioral Approach to Understanding the Git Experience

Towards computational reproducibility: researcher perspectives on the use and sharing of software

Preserving Data Journalism: A Systematic Literature Review

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