An Approach to Software Preservation

Long-term preservation of software components is a key aspect of preservation of data, as software required for processing and analyzing data also needs to be preserved in order to maintain the re-usability of data in future. However, software preservation to date is a relatively underexplored topic of research and frequently seen as a secondary activity, mainly due to the inherent complexity of software artifacts, which is generally deemed a major barrier to their preservation. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework to capture and organise the main notions of software preservation, which are required for a coherent and comprehensive approach. In particular, the framework introduces a notion of adequacy of preservation, an aspect of the OAIS concept of authenticity which tests the future performance of software against specified preservation properties. We also evaluate the application of the software preservation framework in the context of a use case involving the British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC).