[SCC_Active_Members] Al Kossow becomes the Chairman of the Software Preservation Group

[Bernard L. Peuto]

Software Preservation Friends

I am very pleased to announce that Al Kossow has agreed to become the
Chairman of the Software Preservation Group.

Over the last few months Al and I had been discussing the goals of the
Software Preservation Group and his current efforts at software
preservation. It became clear that we should expand the scope of the
activities of the Software Preservation Group. The group should support and
nurture projects like Al's specific preservations efforts, the passionate
volunteers collecting efforts (illustrated by Paul's Fortran and Lisp
projects or the NLS project with Phil, Kathe and Jonathan) that are
continuing with CTOS, SNOBOL etc, other projects like the Greenstone pilot
project and many more including  workshops, outreach to other software
collecting communities, etc.

Given this ambitious list of projects and the need for more volunteers' help
especially in the actual saving of "software bits and documents" which Al
has so greatly pioneered it only made sense to create a different support
structure. So after a very short transition Al will become the Chairman of
the Software Preservation Group and I will continue on as a volunteer on new
Software Preservation projects under this new umbrella. Starting with the
June 27 meeting Al will create the SPG agenda and run the meetings. Beyond
the continuation of the existing pilot projects the expanded Software
Preservation Group will also focus on "software bits and documents" projects
as described below 

Currently, the Museum has tens of thousands of disks, tapes, etc. that need
to be read so that their contents can be verified and put into a long-term
repository. This is a very large effort that requires hardware and software
development as well as manpower to actually do the transfers. Through the
proactive collecting efforts that have been going on, we are acquiring media
at a rate faster than can possibly be processed without a significant
volunteer effort. We also have the SAP collection to process this summer,
which has a significant collection of documentation and media to sort and
catalog.
 
In addition to reading media, a large effort is required to annotate and
verify the media that has already been read, or is being made available to
the Museum in machine- readable form. Verification of the digital contents
require the expansion of the media format library that is already in
progress, as well as additional interpretation and simulation programs.

 Once the software has been read, and verified, it needs to be combined with
references and annotations by people who are knowledgeable about the
software, so that the artifact can be put into a historical context and be
made available for restoration teams, exhibit designers, curators, and
external researchers or hobbyists.

We both hope that these new projects will attract new volunteers who will
join the existing group of volunteers.

At the time of this transition I would like to reflect on the tremendous
progress that we have made in software collecting and preservation since
the creation of our predecessor group, the Software Collection Committee.
First credit should be given to Len, John and the board for committing to
this software project 4 years ago at a time when an exaggerated big iron
image seemed to indicate that software was not a concern of the museum. Our
first step was to organize a first workshop on Software collection and
preservation that benefited from the pioneering work that Grady Booch had
done. It gave us an initial road map for the work of the Software Collecting
Committee. Now, four years later, after a name change, more than 33 meetings
with 15 to 20 attendees per meeting, and a distribution list of more than
110 members our commitment to Software Preservation cannot be questioned.

We have established a very active community that has created a small web
site (established by Sellam Ismail and maintained by Mike Powell)
illustrating some of our pilot projects (Fortran, Lisp, NLS etc). We
understand  better the challenges and unique factors associated with
Software preservation and interested parties can take advantage of our
accumulated expertise, learn from these pilot projects or read transcripts
and email threads of our various discussions. We are in the final steps of
establishing a standard legal agreement with several major software
companies allowing the museum and its patrons access to their historical
software source material. We have benefited from the generosity of the
Robert N. Miner foundation which is sponsoring  the Software Curator
position held by Al Kossow.

As a small but very significant example of all the great contributions of
the volunteers and staff  I would like to mentioned the (Second) Software
Preservation workshop held a year ago whose transcript and slides have been
posted recently our web site. My thanks to Dag, Paula, Kirsten and the
participants for a very interesting transcript that always gets excellent
reviews from its readers.

I am afraid that I will not have enough room to recognize in few lines all
the other great participants to this preservation efforts, so to all of them
thanks for the road traveled. Much remains to be done but these first steps
are impressive and we should all be proud of our accomplishments.

Bernard L Peuto