Earlier this summer, I gave a lunchtime lecture at the Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship(CREOS) describing exploratory research I conducted from 2016-2018 as a DLF/CLIR postdoctoral fellow in Software Curation at the MIT Libraries’ Program in Information Science. The talk focuses on the problem of preserving significant research software, as both a process or output and as a cultural heritage artifact, and to consider strategies for how research libraries can assist in taking care of computational materials over time.

Some questions I address in this talk include:

• Why is preserving software difficult from an archival/library perspective?
• What strategies can help research libraries prepare for acquiring, collecting, and preserving research software?
• How does a framing of “caretaking” facilitate better digital preservation and curation strategies and practices?

See the presentation here

Presentation slides for the talk.

JASIST Article (early view)