Participatory Design for Long-Term Access: User Research, Software Preservation and Emulation

Our collections, research, and scholarship are increasingly software-dependent. However, within the digital repository landscape, few organizations are actively engaged in programmatic software preservation and emulation. The Sloan Foundation and Mellon Foundation-funded Scaling Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) program of work aim to enable access to digital objects within emulated software environments. The first six months of work on the project were dedicated to understanding our users' mental models of emulation, the use cases that drove their interest in the project and the gap between programmatic software preservation and existing practice. In this presentation, members of the EaaSI project staff will describe the user research activities undertaken by the founding nodes of the EaaSI network, the goal of each user research activity, methods used, activity results and the different ways that EaaSI staff have applied results to inform the design of EaaSI services. The presentation will address challenges associated with managing a broad and diverse group of stakeholders and provide examples of the EaaSI team's approach to managing their divergent expectations and requirements.