The resources provided can be read in any order you please, but just to give you a sense of the timeline:
1987_bearmanreport_softwarearchive: David Bearman was commissioned to write this technical report by the Charles Babbage Institute and the Computer History Museum (located in Boston at the time).
Ardenconference1990: Brochures, reports and articles about the LOC's pilot "Machine-readable Collections Reading Room." The Arden files were digitized and shared by Henry Lowood. The papers should not be reproduced or published without express permission from Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections.
These items are cited as:
Henry Lowood Papers (SC1187). Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif.
Headstrom_Bearman_1990PreservingSoftwareSystems: skip to p.10, there is a review of the Symposium on the Preservation of Microcomputing Software
Matthews_frameworksforsoftwarepreservation: Matthews' work feeds into the JISC report below. Although it seems like a bit of a Moore's Law solution to build software in order to preserve software as it is being developed, this article and the significant properties article below represent considerable work on the larger issue of software preservation.
JISC_significantpropertiesofsoftware: see above
emulationasaservice: Although van der Hoeven initially wrote about EaaS in 2009 (possibly earlier), this article is useful for thinking about serving up stacks for access might scale - and it reminds us that even once we have the infrastructure, we need still need the software to run on top.
preservingexefinalreport: You can compare this to Bearman and Hedstrom's reviews of the Symposium on the Preservation of Microcomputing Software. The "Lures" that Lowood talks about are worth thinking about but at the same time, be reminded that there is a middle ground between providing full digital preservation investment (collection material status to the titles you collect) and providing none. The NSRL is interesting but as you can see, is not a lending depository. It's unclear how the mission of that organization, in partnership with LOC, will change overtime.
