Curation as 'Interoperability With the Future': Preserving Scholarly Research Software in Academic Libraries

摘要

Born-digital materials are inherently complex and represent challenges for collecting institutions. Changes in form and format have vast implications for the preservation of scholarship, requiring different tools, technologies, and workflows. Our research modeled software curation as the active caretaking practices to support the meaningful creation, use, and reuse of software. Using an ecosystems approach, we frame research software stewardship within a larger context of intersecting sociomaterial needs, uses, and practices. While preservation criteria may change according to different stakeholder needs, we identified six topical areas of curation that can improve preservation-readiness across different phases of research software stewardship.This study identifies a host of future areas of research with the potential for high-impact outcomes, including methods for extracting legacy content, development of digital preservation metadata and associated workflows, and understanding what different communities of practice require when reusing born-digital content. Further research is needed to test the proposed curation model we have developed, although we have begun pilot testing templates with recruited practitioners working on software preservation. At the same time, what defines the material boundaries of research software? How do institutions want to represent digital research objects for meaningful access and use? How should research libraries and archives approach and handle legacy media that has been stored separately from its original collection, sometimes untouched for years (or decades)? What caretaking strategies can supportpreservation goals? These open questions can serve as areas of future research.Communities of practice have only recently begun to address these complexities and new approaches have been slow to emerge. The decision framework we have introduced provides a mechanism for research library staff to responsibly intervene at various points across the research software stewardship lifecycle, and provide guidance on curation actions that can be implemented. It also introduces a vision for shared collaboration and utilization of skill sets across domains in service to performing the "hard work of software history" (Lowood, 2013, p. 1). Effectively characterizing software in its dual role as both artifact and active producer of artifacts remains an essential piece of understanding and ensuring its complex value over time.