Emulation Beyond Borders: How Can We Sustain and Scale Emulation and Software Preservation?
Brenna Edwards Claire Fox Ethan Gates Jessica Meyerson Oleg Stobbe Wendy Chu Wendy Hagenmaier
This interactive session will bring conference participants together to discuss how we can collaborate across institutional and geographic borders to sustain and scale more equitable engagement with emulation and software preservation. Anyone curious about emulation or preserving access to software or born-digital collections is welcome and encouraged to participate. 

The emerging EaaSI Research Alliance—an international community of libraries, archives, and museums using the Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) software—offers a promising opportunity to bolster international cooperation and expand adoption of emulation as a method of preserving access to software and software-dependent collections. In this session, representatives from the Alliance and the Software Preservation Network will facilitate in-person and remote participants through a series of gently structured conversations designed to foster connections and make space for everyone to contribute. 

After a quick introduction to ground the session, participants will break into groups based on geography and organization type (including space for students and jobseekers).  These small group discussions will support networking within and outside of geographic and organizational definitions, leveraging common context while also imagining beyond boundaries. Because the formation of lasting collaborations is a key aim, it would be ideal to have time for two rounds of conversations: geographically-based, supporting coordination within intellectual property regimes, and institution-type-based, supporting cross-border cooperation among organizations with similar missions. 

The prompts used in the discussions will illuminate emulation-related points of alignment and difference, including salient use cases and challenges related to operational, technical, usability, climate impact, or intellectual property concerns. Each group will have a designated facilitator from the session team and a pre-identified notetaker. To support remote participation, each in-person group will also have a corresponding virtual breakout room with a pre-identified facilitator and notetaker. 

The organizers will use notes from the session to write a report for the conference proceedings and to articulate a potential set of emulation-related strategic priorities for the emerging EaaSI Research Alliance, Software Preservation Network, iPRES community, and stakeholder communities of practice. A draft of the priorities will be shared with session participants for feedback and then published in the Software Preservation Network Zenodo community to inspire future action.
managing access scaling up