Towards Preserving Digital Culture: An interview with Somaya Langley
Towards Preserving Digital Culture series is a contribution to 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 Somaya! Could you please introduce yourself?
Hello, I’m Somaya Langley and I’ve been working on and off in the field of digital preservation for close to two decades. I’ve also worked in radio broadcasting and have run digital and electronic arts festivals and events. When I first started out working with computers in the 1990s, I had hoped to be a sound and media artist. My first real use of computers was in the early-to-mid ’90s using Apple Macintoshes and Silicon Graphics workstations. In the early days I was using software such HyperCard, Csound, Macromedia Director, and Max (predating Max’s MSP component, and Jitter). The latter of these I still use today.
What are the main benefits of software preservation?
To me, software preservation is the ability to maintain a specific version of software, intended for a particular computing platform and operating system. The aim is to make the software usable beyond the estimated lifespan of the technologies, infrastructure, systems and services — including hardware, dongles, operating systems, ‘cloud’ environments, and other dependencies — that are necessary in order for the software to function.
For organisations responsible for maintaining digital culture there is a primary benefit. Tasked with stewarding digital collections that have not yet been migrated for use in contemporary software packages, software preservation may be the most effective way forward. If the digital content is considered ‘complex’ and/or the file formats are not well understood, in addition to being technically complicated, migrating these files may require intensive resourcing and will likely be prohibitively expensive. There are some caveats with software preservation; if the preserved software is unable to be used (i.e. run within an emulation environment or similar), then the immediate benefit may be reduced.
For the general public, there is likely already a demand for accessing legacy digital content, but people may not know who to turn to for assistance.
What are the challenges and/or obstacles?
The first challenge is funding. Whether it is for audiovisual, digital, or software preservation, most preservation practitioners spend considerable time advocating for what we do, in order to seek funding. This funding may be sought internally, through grants, or in rarer cases through philanthropy. Funding underpins necessary infrastructure.
Infrastructure is the second challenge. As an arts and cultural sector (or as an individual organisation) we need infrastructure for digital collections. This includes infrastructure to prepare and run the software that digital collections rely upon. While some infrastructure can be established collaboratively (and through partnerships), ultimately it needs to integrate with the various other systems each organisation has deployed.
This leads to the third challenge: systems integration. It incredibly important, and one of the huge inefficiencies I find in cultural organisations such as collecting institutions. The systems for managing digital collections aren’t often fully set up and integrated in the way that they need to be. As a result, humans are the ‘adaptors’ connecting and conveying the data between the different systems. This results in a lot of manual ‘copy & paste’ activity taking place. It’s not a discerning use of people, and my wish is that the work was better allocated between machines and people, each working to their strengths.
It would be remiss of me if I didn’t mention cybersecurity. The contemporary challenges we face today in our networked environments — which only become more involved as time progresses — are likely to require future and/or ongoing testing. This will be necessary if organisations are required to keep their cybersecurity accreditations up to date.
The second last challenge I want to mention is about scale. The scale of the software preservation problem is massive. I wouldn’t even hazard a guess at how many current and legacy software programs and Apps have been developed even in the past forty years. We don’t necessarily know what we will need going forward. What we do know is that software companies may not have maintained their own archives.
No single organisation is well resourced enough to really do this problem justice. Software preservation is resource intensive and requires specialist (and in many cases in-depth) knowledge of how different software packages work. Depending on how ‘software’ is defined, in particular cases being able to preserve the software will require knowing the codebase. If what is needed is a bunch of scripts found on GitHub (and archived in their Arctic Code Vault instance), perhaps there’s enough current widespread knowledge and documentation to get them running. However legacy, highly discipline-specific proprietary software is likely a considerable challenge, especially if the developers and users of this software are now deceased.
The last challenge is about resourcing. Many preservation practitioners — regardless of whether they work in audiovisual, digital, software preservation or an adjacent field — contribute a considerable amount of their time voluntarily. This is everything from the communities who have been integral to legacy video game preservation to people working in cultural institutions who have (for decades) put in work on evenings and weekends in order to develop the tools and standards we need to sustain our digital collections. This has honestly become unsustainable, yet without this additional effort I see this as a considerable hurdle to us collectively seriously addressing software preservation.
None of these challenges are solely limited to software preservation. They are the same types of challenges other disciplines face when operating in the digital environment. However these challenges will significantly impede and impact on software preservation attempts.
What would be your advice on collectively moving forward on software preservation?
For well over a decade we have spoken about working with multinational technology companies who produce the tools we use, including software. If there was ever a time to make a serious collective attempt to approach software companies, it would be now.
As a preservation sector there is this notion that the further upstream you embed digital preservation thinking, the better the chance of the long-term survival of the digital content output. The same should be said of software.
While the technical challenges might come to mind first, a considerable proportion of software and Apps used today is the product of a commercial environment. Being able to feed into software development cycles in order to contribute the necessary long-term considerations for software preservation would be a huge step forward.
Could you recommend us with a blog, article or publication that you particularly appreciated?
I would suggest essential foundational reading includes the Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-term Access to Digital Information report published by the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access in 2010. While for obvious reasons it doesn’t include the last fourteen years of technology advancement (widespread machine learning implementations and ‘cloud’ technology usage) there are some important considerations, with the report discussing both benefits and economic risks.
Thank you, Somaya, for joining this interview series!
