Towards Preserving Digital Culture: An interview with Wendy Hagenmaier
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 Wendy! Before we start, could you tell us more about yourself?
Yes, of course! I have worked as an archivist and preservation practitioner in academic libraries in the U.S. for nearly twelve years. I’m passionate about preserving access to software and fostering collaboration among organizations engaged in this work, such as Software Heritage. I recently started as the Software Preservation Program Manager at Yale University Library, where I lead the Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) program. EaaSI aims to make it “easier” for cultural heritage and memory organizations to use emulation for interactive research access to preserved software, collections, and data. For the past two years, I have served as Strategic Coordinator for the Software Preservation Network (SPN), a coordinated, distributed effort to ensure long-term access to software through community engagement, infrastructure support, and knowledge generation. I’m also an MBA student, exploring strategy, entrepreneurship, and the socioeconomic contexts in which memory organizations can forge durable alliances.
What are the main benefits of software preservation?
Preserving software empowers us to comprehend our pasts, reflect on our presents, and build better futures. For decades already, so much of human culture, research, governance, communication, innovation, conflict, failure, and healing has been engendered using software.
Software is at the core of the experience you had when sending your first email ever. It’s home to the traces you will leave to the next generation. Software itself is culture.
Preserving software enables us to appraise, curate, maintain, provide access to, study, interrogate, and re-use software and digital data that are of enduring importance to a diverse landscape of individuals and societies. In an increasingly software-dependent world, it’s vital that we preserve and provide access not only to software but also to the records of its creation, use, and impact — as Kenneth Seals-Nutt said in his interview for this series, the “who,” not merely the “what” of software. We need preserved software (and the data it can render) as evidence that can help hold the powerful accountable; we need it as a means to nurture compassion across software-dependent generations and geographies.
What are the challenges and/or obstacles?
In the context of memory organizations and cultural heritage institutions, a few challenges I might name are labor and resource scarcity, systemic threats to inter-organizational collaboration, lack of representation in software collecting and software preservation work, environmental impact considerations, and legal blockers.
As part of the SPN’s Research-in-Practice Working Group, I collaborated with several other cultural heritage colleagues to conduct survey- and interview-based research about the experiences of software preservation service providers — workers in libraries, archives, and museums, primarily in the U.S. Our 2022 report illuminated several barriers, but I think the root challenge we face is the chronic labor and resource scarcity in cultural heritage organizations.
As Eira Tansey demonstrates about the U.S. context in A Green New Deal for Archives, staffing and investment in archives has not kept pace with rates of collection growth and user demand. Funding for durable services and infrastructure that serve the public good, like cultural heritage organizations, has struggled in the context of increasing privatization and the devaluation of long-term maintenance work. Somaya Langley underscored this labor-related challenge in her interview for this series, characterizing the burden on preservation workers as “honestly…unsustainable.” At current funding and staffing levels, most cultural heritage organizations and practitioners simply do not have time or resources to consider software preservation, let alone to design collective solutions for the other challenges I named above.
I often reflect on these quotes from two participants in our SPN research study:
“Maybe I would complain more about legalities and rights if I felt the operational side [of software preservation] was actually something we could do.”
“The requirements [of software preservation] are beyond the scope of what we have the resources for. And that’s less about the technological hardware resources and more about the human resources.”
This challenge is germane to software preservation, in particular, because as a result of labor and resource scarcity, software preservation is understandably seen by so many cultural heritage organizations as a “nice-to-have,” not a “must-do.”
But it is a “must-do” — a collective “must-do,” which, like cultural heritage organizations and workers themselves, needs to be properly resourced.
What would be your advice on collectively moving forward on software preservation?
To address the labor and resource challenge I mentioned above, I hope that cultural heritage organizations and workers might step even more into our collective power — advocating together for sufficient staffing and funding, refusing to be paralyzed by fear of uncertain outcomes, rejecting a future in which historically marginalized organizations and individuals are the ones with the least access to preserved software and software-dependent knowledge. The deepest strategic strength memory organizations possess is our capacity for relationship-based and infrastructural collaboration across institutions, individuals, and borders of all kinds. We can lean further into this.
To make software preservation a “must-do” we need to connect it to the immediate priorities that memory workers, leaders, resource allocators, and end-users care about — the problems for which they need solutions now. Those problems are real: mandates to ensure the reproducibility of research data; rising researcher demand for access to software-dependent archives; urgent calls for information literacy about the design, ethics, and impacts of algorithms. When we position software preservation as a clear and attainable solution to those problems, and as obviously resonant with the local priorities of individual organizations, we create shared momentum for imagining resilient inter-organizational answers to the challenges we face.
That positioning work for software preservation starts with curiosity and empathy, I think — asking caring questions about what those workers, leaders, resource allocators, and end-users need.
Could you recommend us with a blog, article or publication that you particularly appreciated?
SPN has published so many important and immediately useful resources:
- Software Metadata Recommended Format (SMRF) Guide, Version 1.1.0, created by the Metadata Working Group
- Survey of Video Game Reissue Market in the United States (co-published with the Video Game History Foundation and led by Phil Salvador), which was also recommended by Amy Thomas in her interview for this series
- Supporting Software Preservation Services in Research and Memory Organizations, the study I mentioned, conducted by the Research-in-Practice Working Group
- A wealth of guides related to law and policy that are relevant to practitioners in the U.S. and Canada and could be models for law and policy work in other jurisdictions
- Plus webinars, presentations, a bibliography and more
For those interested in learning more about emulation and Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure, I highly recommend these beautiful Training Modules created by my colleague Ethan Gates.
And for those interested in collaboration and envisioning new ways of working together, I recommend:
- A Green New Deal for Archives, by Eira Tansey, which I mentioned
- The Art, Science, and Magic of the Data Curation Network: A Retrospective on Cross-Institutional Collaboration, from the Data Curation Network
- Beloved Economies, by Jess Rimington and Joanna L. Cea
- It Takes a Village: Open Source Software Sustainability, from Lyrasis
- Reaching out to me with your own recs! I’d love to learn from them.
Thank you, Wendy, for your participation in this interview series!
