In saying "you've always pushed hard for formalizing the software collection process," you express a misunderstanding. I'm looking for something else--the ability of repositories and scholars to share stuff in those particular cases in which they want to share, and to annotate by links that show "interesting" relationships of stuff as well as other metadata, sharing those annotations without confusing them with the original materials. In this, "share" might or might not involve copying. To achieve this without limiting what any institution or individual is able to do and also to support building on other people's similar work requires that certain aspects of metadata follow common conventions. I.e., it helps immensely to have common methods/representations for how metadata is linked to data and other metadata. E.g., a reason that you can productively use any library in the world is that the libraries use common conventions for their catalogues and for library-annotations on the spines of books. Another way of saying the same thing is that a museum collection is useful only if it is a great deal more than a pile of stuff collected into a single room. Your "loose coalition" would not work without shared language among its members. An example of shared language might be a common way of identifying works so that anybody can clearly see which are identical and which are different, and also which different ones are related to each other. Best wishes, Henry H.M. Gladney, Ph.D. <a href="http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/">http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/</a> (408)867-3933 <div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 05:37, Tim Shoppa <<a href="mailto:shoppa@trailing-edge.com">shoppa@trailing-edge.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div class="im">Henry Gladney <<a href="mailto:hgladney@gmail.com">hgladney@gmail.com</a>> wrote: </div><div class="im">> This is because I am disappointed that CHM some time ago quit credible > interest in preserving software, which I regard as of commensurate > importance to the areas that it is investing in. This happened > notwithstanding the fact that there are clear ways of achieving this > relatively inexpensively and the efforts of the now-suspended volunteer > Software Preservation Group. </div>A couple years ago the SPG at CHM sponsored "The Attic and the Parlor", which made it clear to me that they appreciate the loose and broad coalition of individuals and corporations and institutions that preserve software. I also got to hear some of the difficulties (esp. legal ones) and triumphs (CHM's then-new software curator's results) of doing this in the CHM framework. Henry, it seems you've always pushed hard for formalizing the software collection process through the CHM. I've come to the realization that the base of interesting software "in the wild" is tremendously huge and often extremely specialized. I think a loose coalition of software archives and archivists, both professional and non-professional, is the right solution at this point. Tim. </blockquote></div>