“…some of the greatest artifacts of the [astronomy] community’s creative problem-solving are at risk of being lost.”

I believe this; a good thing, since this is what Peter Teuben and I wrote in We didn’t see this coming: Our unexpected roles as software archivists and what we learned at Preserving.exe, one of three participant reports in “Preserving.exe: Toward a National Strategy for Software Preservation.”

This report arose from a summit held at the Library of Congress on May 20-21, 2013 by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. Our piece discusses the summit itself, some of what we learned there, and its impact on the way we think about the ASCL and our work. Among the ideas raised at the summit was that of software as a cultural artifact. We wrote:

The Summit broadened our view and appreciation for software as a cultural artifact and as a method of capturing creativity in problem-solving.

Now we see the loss of computational methods that result in research as a loss of part of astronomy’s cultural heritage. This isn’t happening just for astronomy, of course; the Summit made clear that it is happening for everything. With so much rendered digitally, whether born that way or migrated to a digital medium, without preserving the digital artifacts and the software (and sometimes hardware) to lift these artifacts from their digital storage, we risk losing our art, our music, our games, our prose, our data, and our histories, of daily life and activities, of solutions to scientific problems, of popular pastimes and play experiences, and even knowledge of our computer worries and angst.

More on what we learned at the summit is available in the full report, which includes excellent pieces by participants Henry Lowood, Stanford University (The Lures of Software Preservation) and Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland (An Executable Past: The Case for a National Software Registry), an introduction by Trevor Owens, Library of Congress, and interviews of Doug White of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s National Software Reference Library and Michael Mansfield from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

PreservingEXE: Toward a National Strategy for Software Preservation