Dear Colleagues,

We hope this message finds you all safe and healthy.

As February comes to a close and March begins anew, the
Emulation-as-a-Service-Infrastructure (EaaSI) team is happy to share
our February
Resource Highlight, “Software Scenarios for (Re)Use and Access Across Time.
”

It is important to remember that the curation community has been grappling
with software dependencies and software preservation methods since the mid
1980s. You can find a little of that history here
<https://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/software-preservation-literature-review/>
and here <https://web.stanford.edu/~lowood/Texts/hard_work.pdf>.

But in the last decade or so, we’ve seen mounting evidence of field-level
advancement around the ways that institutions and practitioners conceive of
software preservation as well as technological advancements to ensure
long-term access to software. Given the recent gathering of software
scenarios for (re)use & access completed by EaaSI Hosted Service Pilot
<https://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/hosted-emulation-services-pilot-summary/>
testers, we selected two documents that are in conversation across time
about possible scenarios for (re)use and access of software.

*We invite you all to review, compare,and discuss!*

*What are your scenarios for software reuse and access?*

🔹 “Software Preservation Benefits Framework: Purposes, Benefits, and
Scenarios” (from JISC, Curtis+Cartwright, and the Software Sustainability
Institute ): http://bit.ly/softpres-benefits-framework (table with
scenarios for reuse starts on p.2)

🔹“Exploring Curation-Ready Software: Use Cases”, (from members of SPN
Curation-Readiness Working Group):
http://bit.ly/software-curation-use-cases (table
with scenarios for reuse starts on p.4)

Resource Highlights are monthly opportunities for the EaaSI team to pluck
resources from the past or recent past and recontextualize them in light of
our latest activities. Resources range from staff blog posts that connect
software curation and emulation, to current events, to capacity building
templates that provide structured activities for digital curation
practitioners, to influential resources from our recent software
preservation past, to reports from our EaaSI partner organizations on their
own emulation explorations, and more.

-------------------------------

If you have questions for the project team, please contact the EaaSI
Community Outreach & Sustainability Lead, Jessica Meyerson, at
<jessica[at]educopia[dot]org>.


MORE ABOUT EAASI

The EaaSI Program of Work
<https://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/emulation-as-a-service-infrastructure/>
builds on previous work to apply the Emulation-as-a-Service (EaaS)
framework for access and use of preserved software and digital objects. The
project is focused on scaling the technological framework necessary for
multiple institutions to configure, share, and access software and
configured environments. EaaSI is focused on a distributed,
community-driven architecture that sits on top of existing digital
preservation infrastructure. This directly complements existing efforts by
the Software Preservation Network
<https://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/> and others to address key
aspects of software preservation including legal advocacy, research about
local software preservation needs, institutional capacity building for
software preservation, collection development, professional development and
training, and workflow recommendations.

-- 
*Jessica Meyerson*
Director for Research & Strategy | Educopia Institute <http://educopia.org/>
The Maintainers <https://themaintainers.org/>, co-director
Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Fellow

Pronouns: she/her/hers
Working from Austin, TX
jessica[at]educopia[dot]org | 512-864-4575
https://calendly.com/jmeyerson