Greetings Colleagues!

This is an EaaSI program update: The Scaling Software Preservation and Emulation-as-a-Service-Infrastructure (EaaSI) program is administered by Yale University Library and generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. EaaSI brings together a team of digital preservation practitioners, semantic architects, computer scientists and software developers to develop a community-driven, scalable emulation infrastructure. The EaaSI team wants to reach out, share the resources we’ve developed and invite all of you to prioritize our work!

Let’s start with a rundown of where to find the most updated information about different aspects of the project:

• You can hear from members of the project team (including our STELLAR student staff) and our AMAZING Node Hosts and Advisors on the EaaSI News blog

• In a post entitled Making Things EaaSIer: Overview from EaaSI’s PI, Euan Cochrane explains what EaaS (University of Freiburg) affords, and how EaaSI is addressing remaining barriers to enable more practitioners to access, stabilize and reuse their legacy content.

• Seth Anderson, EaaSI Program Manager, provides an EaaSI Update Nov 2018 - Jan 2019 including highlights from the EaaSI Node Partners Kickoff Meeting; a sneak peek at the EaaSI Metadata Model; a report on new software items described in Wikidata and the Shape Expression schema developed by EaaSI Semantic Architect, Kat Thornton

• In the most recent post, entitled Hickory Dickory Docs: Crafting a Documentation Plan for EaaSI, EaaSI Software Preservation Analyst, Ethan Gates, describes how we are fulfilling our promise to provide open, shareable resources to support distributed management, sharing and reuse of emulated software.

• You can find links to our Technical Documentation and Capacity Building Activity templates (for download) on our EaaSI Resources page. We plan on adding more resources over time including Training Modules and Workflow Documentation. Stay tuned!

DIRECT OUR WORK!!! SHARE YOUR SOFTWARE PRIORITIES AND TELL US WHY:

• Yale University is pre-configuring 3,000 software objects to seed the EaaSI Network and we want the prioritization and selection of those objects to come DIRECTLY from community members.

• Please complete this (VERY SHORT) form, in which we ask you 3 questions:

• Pick your top 10 software genres from a list derived from the National Software Reference Library inventory list.

• Rank those 10 in order of least importance to greatest importance

• Tell us which factors (from a list that includes “Other”) had the greatest influence on your prioritization decisions.

To receive bi-monthly EaaSI updates via newsletter and to share your software preservation successes/challenges, sign up for the Software Preservation Network mailing list.

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

Sincerest thanks for reading - we look forward to hearing from you!

Yours in Software Preservation,

Jessica (on behalf of the EaaSI Team)

More information about EaaSI:

The EaaSI program 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 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.