CoSAI is lead by co-PIs Martin Klein (Scientist, LANL Research Library) and Vicky Rampin (Librarian for Research Data Management and Reproducibility, New York University), in collaboration with the Open Curation of Computation and Metadata (OCCAM) initiative at the University of Pittsburgh and Old Dominion University’s Web Science & Digital Libraries Research Group
The two-year project will focus on institutional approaches to provide machine-repeatable and human-understandable workflows for preserving web-based scholarship, specifically source code, while forefronting the role of education, outreach, and community building.
The objective of CoSAI is to lower the barrier of entry to software preservation for organizations through development of a framework for institutional archiving of open scholarly materials, focused on but not exclusive to research software. This work includes developing and testing novel technical solutions, specifically decentralized and federated technology, in order to foster collaboration and increase access to curated materials as well as the curation workflow themselves. A key part of our approach is catalyzing the role of “Software Curation” librarians in academic and government institutions. Technical solutions are very much needed (as evidenced by the outcomes of the Investigating & Archiving the Scholarly Git Experience (IASGE) environmental scan), but the work needs dedicated labor to be successful.
To support these goals, CoSAI will have three main streams of work:
- technical development on open source, community-led tools for collecting, curating, and preserving open scholarship with a focus on research software (resulting in software, workflows, and documentation),
- community building around open scholarship, software collection and curation, and archiving of open scholarship (resulting in educational and outreach materials), and
- optimizing workflows for archiving open scholarship with ephemera, via machine-actionable and manual workflows (resulting in workflows, narratives, and primers).
Expected outcomes of CoSAI are a minimal-computing toolkit for federated software preservation including (semi-)automatic quality control of archived records, catalyzing the role of software curation librarians, and community building around the importance of long-term access to research software for reproducibility and the stability of the scholarly record.
The Prototyping Team brings proven expertise to the project, specifically in the realm of system interoperability protocols such as Memento and novel web archiving frameworks that aim at balancing scale and high-quality such as Tracer
If you are interested in this area of work or simply would like to learn more about our efforts, please feel free to get in touch.
