Towards Preserving Digital Culture: An interview with Caylin Smith
Towards Preserving Digital Culture series is a contribution to the Software Heritage initiative, supported by INRIA and UNESCO. The primary objective of this series is to underscore the pivotal role of software heritage preservation in mitigating the loss of digital cultural heritage. Through these interviews, we present diverse perspectives to foster discussions on challenges related to technological progress, obsolescence, legal limitations, and preservation complexities, contributing to addressing current field needs.
Hello Caylin! Thank you for joining us in this interview series! Could you tell us more about yourself?
Hi, I’m Caylin! I lead the Digital Preservation team at Cambridge University Libraries. CUL comprises the University Library, the main research library for the University, and thirty-four faculty and departmental libraries.
The Digital Preservation team provides services to support the current and long-term preservation of digital collections materials.
We take a broad approach to preservation, looking at how decisions made throughout a lifecycle for collection management help ensure successful preservation, so it’s important we understand the needs of colleagues and their content to deliver solutions that are fit for purpose.
I’m also a trustee for the Centre for Computing History, which is a museum and educational charity based in Cambridge focused on collecting, preserving, and showcasing computing history using its collection as well as outreach and educational activities.
What are the main benefits of software preservation?
There are a few main areas that software preservation benefits:
First, within the context of a collecting institution, software preservation is crucial for enabling researchers to comprehensively study the 20th and 21st centuries.
Secondly, it supports reproducing, interpreting, contributing to, and validating findings of any research that’s been undertaken using software or code.
Finally, within born-digital archives are commonly a range of formats, some of which now be obsolete or approaching obsolescence. Software from across the history of computing will be needed to provide access to content or to inform whether content has been successfully migrated or emulated.
What are the challenges and/or obstacles?
The Transfer Service is one service the Digital Preservation team provides to library staff and collection materials on storage carriers, and I’m continually amazed by what my colleague Leontien Talboom, the team’s Technical Analyst, finds out from carrying out this work.
Usually, the data can be logically or forensically transferred from magnetic and optical carriers, but other times, this might not be possible due to a range of reasons, including software incompatibility and obsolescence. This work poses challenges of reading the data on the carriers as well as being able to open the files and have them render, play, etc., and generally function as expected.
Along with challenges relating to software, we’ve seen disk rot where the carrier has started to physically break down over time and will need to source hardware to transfer data from some carriers. The Libraries have 3’’ floppy discs, for example, which is not a common format for this kind of magnetic storage.
These issues will continue to get more complex into the future, as content created using software-as-a-service is also a challenge to collecting institutions. Since there’s nothing physically purchased and owned in this model, this impacts all areas within a collection management lifecycle.
What would be your advice on collectively moving forward on software preservation?
Collaboration and communication are key elements to moving forward collectively. And the topics that encompass software preservation will grow as technology progresses.
Initiatives like the Software Heritage Foundation, Internet Archive, and institutional repositories are crucial for providing infrastructure for preserving software.
Alongside infrastructure, communities like the Software Heritage Network are important for bringing together individuals to discuss policy, legal, advocacy, collection management, amongst other topics, as they relate to preserving software.
I also think it’s important to determine how software preservation impacts the collections at your own institution and then see which communities to engage.
The success of the work to transfer data from storage carriers has been in part to sharing knowledge and expertise with peers undertaking similar work elsewhere and by information shared within hobbyist communities that we’ve also been fortunate to benefit from.
Could you recommend us with a blog, article or publication that you particularly appreciated?
It’s hard to pick just one!
I’ve learned lots about old software and hardware from the content Foone Turing writes about.
Tom Ensom and Jack McConchie lead a group about caring for immersive media, specifically virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, 360 video, real-time 3D software, and other similar materials:
The No Time to Wait! conference initially focused on audio-visual preservation but has grown over the years to also include presentations about content that requires software and hardware preservation, including time-based media artworks and videogames.
Thank you, Caylin, for participing in this project!
