software archive – InfoDoc MicroVeille

Authors : Roberto di Cosmo, Morane Gruenpeter, Bruno Marmol, Alain Monteil, Laurent Romary, Jozefina Sadowsa

Software has become an indissociable support of technical and scientific knowledge. The preservation of this universal body of knowledge is as essential as preserving research articles and data sets.

In the quest to make scientific results reproducible, and pass knowledge to future generations, we must preserve these three main pillars: research articles that describe the results, the data sets used or produced, and the software that embodies the logic of the data transformation.

The collaboration between Software Heritage (SWH), the Center for Direct Scientific Communication (CCSD) and the scientific and technical information services (IES) of The French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (Inria) has resulted in a specified moderation and curation workflow for research software artifacts deposited in the HAL the French global open access repository.

The curation workflow was developed to help digital librarians and archivists handle this new and peculiar artifact – software source code. While implementing the workflow, a set of guidelines has emerged from the challenges and the solutions put in place to help all actors involved in the process.

URL : Curated Archiving of Research Software Artifacts: Lessons Learned from the French Open Archive (HAL)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v15i1.698

Emulation is a strategy receiving increasing attention in the long-term digital archiving community. It can act as a complement to the otherwise dominant digital preservation strategies of migration and has convincing advantages, especially for dynamic digital objects. Nevertheless, a range of conditions must be met for successful reproduction of such digital objects in the future.

The incorporation of view paths to identify the necessary metadata as well as additional software components may propose extensions of the OAIS reference model. This paper combines this view path concept, which captures the contextual information of software, with additional insights, thereby improving the flexibility of the approach.

The concept provides insights into workflow instructions allowing for the archive management to preserve access to its artifacts. The view path model requires extensions of the metadata sets of the primary object as well as additionally stored secondary objects resulting in a reproduction of the object’s environment, e.g. applications or operating systems.

This paper addresses strategies regarding reference environments and gives an outlook for how to apply emulation strategies in the long-term while improving user convenience and maximizing emulation capabilities.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18984/