Happy World Digital Preservation Day!

Program Announcements
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On behalf of the entire EaaSI team, happy World Digital Preservation Day 2022!

It is an exciting time of transition for the EaaSI program and community, so I’d like to take a moment just to look back at this past year and share some highlights and accomplishments.

  • iPres 2022

    • Proceedings from the 18th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPres) are now available! This includes our capstone summary of the EaaSI program of work as well as several other papers from key EaaSI staff and contributors:
      • “Usable Software Forever: The Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) Program of Work”, by @ecochrane, @klaus.rechert, Jurek Oberhauser, @seth.r.anderson, @claireafox and @ethan.gates
      • “A Generic Emulator Interface for Digital Preservation – Towards a Collaborative Distributed Emulator Registry” by Rafael Gischke and @klaus.rechert
      • “A Digital Preservation Wikibase” by Dr. Kat Thornton and Kenneth Seals-Nutt
      • “DNA Data Storage for long term digital preservation” by @ecochrane and Daniel Chadash

  • EaaSI platform development

    • The most recent milestone release of the EaaSI platform (v2021.10) was released last December!
    • We are approaching another milestone release; community members and the public can now follow along with the updated EaaSI Development Roadmap and monthly progress reports on the dev-update tag

  • New resources

    • We’ve got a brand-new website! https://eaasi.info is your one-stop portal moving forward for EaaSI program and service details, along with links out to all your other favorite EaaSI material like this Community Forum, the User Handbook, our shared resources with SPN, and more
    • Since last year’s WDPD, we’ve added three more entries in our EaaSI Training Module series, covering:
      • Disk Imaging
      • Building an EaaSI Network
      • Implementing Metadata Standards
    • Look for the eighth (and - for now - final) entry in the Training Module series and a new EaaSI Case Study before the end of the year!
    • EaaSI and emulation receive significant discussion in “Supporting Software Preservation Services in Research and Memory Organizations”, a white paper just published by the Software Preservation Network’s Research-in-Practice working group
  • Expanded community
    • The EaaSI platform went global this year with dedicated funding acquired to start an Australian Emulation Network (fondly known around these parts as “AusEaaSI” :slight_smile: )
    • @mswalwell gave a lovely presentation on this effort recently at the 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art, give it a watch! ISEA2022 SNMAA Melanie Swalwell — The Australian Emulation Network - YouTube
    • We’re excited to work together with the AusEaaSI effort on our shared forum, use cases, troubleshooting and feedback!
  • Software history milestones
    • The Software Emulation Configuration student team at Yale reached a major goal this year by surpassing over 1000 emulated environments created in Yale’s EaaSI node - huge thanks to all of our student staff from the past four years for their collective effort, and to @claireafox not just for guiding this work since January, but for working tirelessly to integrate these efforts into an everyday part of Yale Library’s mission as a now-permanent member of the Library’s Digital Preservation Services team!
    • Meanwhile, software metadata gathered by the YUL/EaaSI team led to over 15,000 properties added or edited related to software and software history in Wikidata in the past year; incredible stuff from Kat Thornton! (You can follow/track all the activity on the YULdigitalpreservation Wikidata account in detail here!)

The EaaSI team is thrilled to play a small part in the vibrant and ever-expanding global community of digital preservation practitioners. Do take some time today to attend an event, read a few blog posts, and/or just generally celebrate and empower a digital archivist near you!