Software preservation study
The Preserving Software Workshop, described below, was held on 7 July 2010 and was a great success.
Presentations from the workshop are available on SlideShare.
Other updates on the preserving software study will be announced on the blog.
Preserving software
Digital content faces a growing challenge. Significant effort is invested in generating digital content, such as data and software, but relatively little work is devoted to sustaining and curating it. A new study by a partnership between Curtis+Cartwright Consulting Limited and the Software Sustainability Institute will clarify the benefits of sustaining and preserving software, and provide practical guidance in how to achieve it.
The study's goal is to raise awareness of sustainability issues and build sustainability into the process of software development - within the education and research sectors. By consulting developers, the study will determine the best ways to ensure sustainability of digital content. These methods will be publcised to enable development teams to make better informed decisions about the future of their software.
Without an investment in sustainability, digital content decays and the effort invested in generating it is wasted. The best ways of achieving sustainability are still being determined. A recent JISC report described this problem "Software preservation is... a relatively new topic of research and there is little practical experience in the field of software preservation per se". This highlights a recent focus on sustainability amongst funding and research councils, which are keen for digital content to be preserved since this represents better value for their investment.
The study will provide answers to questions such as:
- What is software preservation?
- Is software preservation just software maintenance?
- Why do we need to preserve software?
- Does all software need to be preserved and, if not, what does?
- How does good software engineering fit in with software preservation?
- Who will pay for this?
- Can we preserve software by making it open source?
- Can we preserve software by putting in our repository?
- How else can I preserve software?
- For how long does software need to be preserved for?
- What do I do next?
If you would like to take part in the study, contact events@software.ac.uk.
