This document summarizes work done by a group of software curation postdoctoral fellows on conceptual, social, and technical challenges of software curation. It describes a survey conducted with researchers to understand how they use, share, and value software. The survey found that researchers consider software important but have different understandings of "sharing" and "preserving" it. Individual projects also discussed including using emulation as a service to preserve legacy software and extending Wikidata to describe software and environments.

1. Software as a Well-Formed
Research Object
DLF 2017 Forum
Pittsburgh, PA
October 24, 2017
Yasmin AlNoamany, John Borghi, Alexandra Chassanoff, Katherine Thornton

2. Who we are
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Yasmin AlNoamany, University of California, Berkeley
John Borghi, California Digital Library
Alex Chassanoff, MIT Libraries
Katherine Thornton, Yale University Library

3. Background
1st cohort of Software Curation Postdoctoral Fellows at CLIR
Spread across 2 coasts, 5 institutions
Wide range of areas being explored
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4. Software Curation: Conceptual Challenges
What is software?
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5. Software Curation: Conceptual Challenges
What is curation?
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6. Software Curation: Social Challenges
Social
Software in Scholarly Communications
Software and Academic Incentives
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7. Software Curation: Technical Challenges
● Identifying
○ execution environment
○ dependencies and integrated
libraries
○ data
○ metadata
○ individual components
● Evolution
● Compatibility
● Migration
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Image source:
https://www.slideshare.net/robertodicosmo3/scilabtec-2015-48643729

8. Software Curation: Current Work
Survey of Researcher Practices and Perceptions: UC Berkeley
and California Digital Library
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9. Software Curation: Current Work
Research Questions
1. How are researchers using software?
2. How do researchers share their software?
3. What do researchers value about their software?
Areas of interest
1. Software and reproducible research practices
2. Metrics for software

10. Software Curation: Current Work
Background
1. Increasing agreement that software and research-related
code are important scholarly products
2. Research into how research software is mentioned, cited
3. Surveys into practices and perceptions around other
research products (e.g. Data)

11. Software Curation: Current Work
Survey Design
1. Goal was to capture as broad a view of researcher
practices and perceptions as possible.
2. 56 questions
a. 53 Multiple Choice
b. 3 Open Response

14. Software Curation: Current Work
Distribution
1. Approved by UC Berkeley IRB
2. Distributed via Qualtrics
Inclusion Criteria
1. Participant had to consent, be over the age of 18, and
say that they use software during the course of their
research
2. Participant had to complete at least the demographic
section.

15. 215 researchers respondents

16. Software Practices
in Scientific Research

17. Overview of Software Practices
in Scientific Research

19. Use of Research Software

20. Open Source versus Commercial

21. Coding Languages and Purpose

22. Coding Languages and Purpose
55.7% of
researchers selected
all the five purposes
86.4% of all
languages

23. Code Sharing Practices

24. Most of the time, researcher share
source code via emails
In what format do you typically
share your code? How do you share your code?

25. 25
Some reasons:
● “Not elegant”
● “Licensing issues”
● “Time pressure, time
it takes to tidy up and
document code”
● “require 'cleanup'
and better
commenting”

26. Reproducibility Practices

27. CS researchers tend to provide information about
dependencies more than other disciplines
do you share related files (e.g.
datasets) with your code?
do you provide information about
dependencies?

28. Preservation Practices

29. 76.2% of researchers uses Github for
preserving their codes
Where do you save your code or software so
that it is preserved over the long term?
How long do you typically save your code or
software?

30. How do you use software or code in your research?
“Software is the main driver of my research and development program. I use it
for everything from exploratory data analysis, to writing papers. Most of my
research activities include the writing of code specifically aimed at the
implementation of particular analytic methods.”
“I use code to document in a reproducible manner all steps of data analysis,
from collecting data from where they are stored (databases, spreadsheets,
plain text files, etc.) to preparing the final reports (i.e. a set of scripts
can fully reproduce a report or manuscript given the raw data, with little
human intervention).”
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31. How do you define “sharing” and “preserving”?
“I think of sharing code as making it publicly accessible, but not necessarily
advertising it. I think of preserving code as depositing it somewhere
remotely, where I can't accidentally delete it. I realize that GitHub should
not be the end goal of code preservation, but as of yet I have not taken steps
to preserve my code anywhere more permanently than GitHub.”
“..."Sharing", to me, means that somebody else can discover and obtain the
code, probably (but not necessarily) along with sufficient documentation to
use it themselves. "Preserve" has stronger connotations. It implies a higher
degree of documentation, both about the software itself, but also its history,
requirements, dependencies, etc., and also feels more "official"- so my
university's data repository feels more "preserve"-ish than my group's Github
page.”
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32. Conclusion
● Researchers consider software to be as important as data
● Most researchers do differentiate sharing from
preservation, but they need tools and guidance on how to
preserve their code
● Time and licenses are the main constraints of sharing
software

33. Software Curation: Current Work
MIT Libraries
● Iterative approach
● Consider software
● as an artifact with characteristics
● as a research process
→ Software as a scholarly object in a
digital scholarship ecosystem
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34. Software Curation: Current Work
MIT Libraries
● Software Curation Profiles
● Software Intake Form
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35. Software Curation: Current Work
Strategic thinking for institutions
● Define communities of practice
● Identify boundaries for software as a scholarly object
● Identify preservation outcomes + curation activities
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● Don’t Let Perfect Be the Enemy of Good
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36. Software Curation: Current Work at Yale
Legacy software in library collections
CD-ROMs and floppy disks at risk of deterioration
Library might not have relevant computing platform
Cataloged according to principles of traditional MARC-based
description
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37. Emulation as a Service
http://bw-fla.uni-freiburg.
de/
Developed by Albert Ludwigs
Universität Freiburg
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38. EaaS and Wikidata
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39. Wikidata for Digital Preservation
Describing software, file
formats, and configured
environments in Wikidata
Proposing necessary
properties to extend data
models
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40. Thank you!
Yasmin yasminal@berkeley.edu
John john.borghi@ucop.edu
Alex achass@mit.edu
Katherine katherine.thornton@yale.edu
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41. References
Introduction to Software Survey
Software Preservation Network
The Pathways of Research Software Preservation
Metadata Standards Survey: Initial Results, Analysis, and
Next Steps
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