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Meeting Date, Location

May 20–21, 2013
Library of Congress, James Madison Building
Montpelier Room, 6th Floor
101 Independence Ave. SE
Washington, DC 20540

Resources

• Final Report (PDF, 752KB)
• Meeting Agenda (PDF, 19KB)
• Participants List (PDF, 24KB)
• Projects of Interest and Recommended Resources (PDF, 36KB)
• Abstracts of Presentations (PDF, 20KB)
• Community reflections: blog posts by meeting attendees and news articles:
  • The Ex-files: how long will our software last? (external link), Jon Ippolito, University of Maine
  • History.exe: How can we preserve the software of today for historians of tomorrow? (external link), Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Marlyand
  • The 10 Most Influential Software Programs Ever (external link), Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Marlyand
  • Blog posts on The Signal: Preserving.exe: A Short List of Readings on Software Preservation, What are We Going to do About Hardware?, Hardware Matters, Preserving.exe report: Toward a National Strategy for Preserving Software
  • Twitter: Tweetdoc (PDF, 712KB); TweetExplorer (external link); #presoft (external link)
  • Photos (external link) from Peter Teuben, University of Maryland, College Park

Meeting Goals

The event brought together software creators and representatives from source code repositories with curators and archivists working on collecting and preserving software and scholars currently studying software and source code as cultural, historical and scientific artifacts. The workshop focused on discussions of tractable approaches to the preservation of software and its history, with discussions of substantive, ongoing efforts to preserve and make available historical software applications. Some of those questions addressed included:

• What is the use and value of old code and software?
• When should organizations focus on preserving/collecting executable content? When should they focus on original source code? In what cases should they focus on tertiary content, e.g., bug tracking systems and internal development mailing lists?

Desired Outcomes

• Articulate the problems and opportunities of software preservation.
• Propose new partnerships and collaborations that will support organization's roles and responsibilities related to software preservation.
• Advise the Library of Congress on next steps, including different methods and approaches that will develop criteria for assessing long-term value; and what new organizational models will best support the stewardship of software content.

Presentations

• Barbara Guttman, The National Institute of Standards and Technology, "The National Software Reference Library" (PDF 83KB)
• Amy Stevenson, Microsoft Archives, "Software Preservation at a Software Company" (PDF, 991KB)
• Paul Klamer, The National Audio Visual Conservation Center "Optical Media Mass Ingest"(PDF, 322KB)
• Peter Teuben, The Astrophysics Source Code Library, "Astrophysics Source Code Library"(PDF, 431)
• Nick Montfort, The Trope Tank, "Hardware and Emulation" (PDF, 964KB)
• Trevor Owens, The Library of Congress, "Perspectives on the Value of Software Preservation" (PDF, 19KB)
• Moryma Aydelott, The Library of Congress, "Embedded, Included or Needed - Software and the Library of Congress Tangible Media Project" (PDF, 63KB)
• David Gibson, The Library of Congress, "Video Games at the LOC" (PDF, 12KB)