Yale University
To transition emulation and software preservation infrastructure to sustainability in order to ensure that software and software-dependent digital content is accessible by future generations
The Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) project is an extensive platform for software curation and preservation. Beyond its core functionality, which builds and curates “virtual machines” that can execute any piece of archived software, regardless of the hardware on which it was originally designed to run, the project has responded to demand from partners and developed critical services like a hosted “reading room” for library CD-ROM collections and a Universal Virtual Interactor that can open any digital file natively in the appropriate application (and version) in which it was created. Anchored at the Yale University Library, the project team led by digital preservation manager Euan Cochrane and software preservation program manager Seth Anderson has built out a robust open source codebase, which in addition to production use at Yale has been piloted at 15 other universities and is being adopted by initiatives in Canada and Australia. This grant supports the continued development and expansion of the EaaSI platform as it matures and moves towards long term sustainability. Grant funds will support three streams of work: maintenance of the existing EaaSI services; development of automation and other approaches to lower costs for and appeal to new institutional users (with an emphasis on the archiving of computational research pipelines); and market development toward long term sustainability.