It strikes me as a good time to introduce myself and ask for conversations/feedback on the active research I'm doing at MIT Libraries to understand more about potential uses of historical and contemporary software. This work aims at informing strategies for curation activities at academic libraries/archives to ensure that what we are saving is indeed what scholars of technology such as yourself may find useful. Of course, we can't anticipate all future needs and uses. But characterizing aspects of the current space (both in recounting work on legacy software or thinking about examples of contemporary use) can help us to make the case for the importance of active care-taking of materials at our institutions. As of late, the conversation in academic research libraries has focused on software as part of research data management. I'd like to make sure the archival perspective makes its way into this conversation. Please let me know if you'd be willing to chat "offline" about some of my research and answer some questions. I'm working on a couple of tools to assist curators in information-gathering from software creators/owners. It would be great to have input from this community. Many thanks, Alex --------------- Alexandra Chassanoff DLF/CLIR Software Curation Fellow MIT Libraries http://softarchitectures.wordpress.com