Automation is Documentation: Functional Documentation of Human-Machine Interaction for Future Software Reuse

Preserving software and providing access to obsolete software is necessary and will become even more important for work with any kind of born-digital artifacts. While usability and availability of emulation in digital curation and preservation workflow has improved significantly, productive (re)use of preserved obsolete software is a growing concern, due to a lack of (future) operational knowledge. In this article we describe solutions to automate and document software usage in a way, such that the result is not only instructive but also productive

How Long Can We Build It? Ensuring Usability of a Scientific Code Base

Software and in particular source code became an important component of scientific publications and henceforth is now subject of research data management.  Maintaining source code such that it remains a usable and a valuable scientific contribution is and remains a huge task. Not all code contributions can be actively maintained forever. Eventually, there will be a significant backlog of legacy source-code. In this article we analyse the requirements for applying the concept of long-term reusability to source code. We use simple case study to identify gaps and provide a technical infrastructure based on emulator to support automated builds of historic software in form of source code. &nbsp