Using the CoSAI ecosystem to archive scholarly code with docs and discussions
Vicky Rampin Talya Cooper Martin Klein David Wilkinson Lyudmila Balakireva Emily Escamilla David Calano Michael L. Nelson Michele C. Weigle
As more scholars code in the open, digital stewards need accessible methods to reliably archive this code and surrounding contextual information. We will be demo-ing a software and Web archive workflow using an interconnected ecosystem of open source tools: [OCCAM][1] with plugins for [Memento Tracer][2] and [Memento Damage][3]. We use these together to create a repeatable, human- and computer-readable workflow to preserve scholarly code on the Web with its discussion threads, documentation, and other contextual scholarly ephemera that you can’t get with a `git clone`. 

OCCAM is an open source software preservation and workflow execution system that allows users to visually create executable workflows. OCCAM instances can federate with each other, allowing for these to be shared. Memento Tracer is a browser extension that allows users to click on desired elements from  an exemplar webpage to create JSON ‘traces,’ which are then used to crawl and create Web archives. These traces can be used on websites that look similar to each other (e.g. code repositories on GitHub or GitLab) and can themselves be version controlled. Memento Damage is an open source tool that calculates how well a web page is archived by identifying the missing resources (images, multimedia, CSS, and JavaScript) and then measuring the importance of those missing resources.

We use OCCAM as the “driver,” where we visually build (via drag-and-drop) the processes together and run it together. So we use Git clone to grab the source code, as well as run a Memento trace to grab other elements of a repository page that we want to keep for history and debugging purposes -- issue threads, pull requests, project boards, online documentation, etc. We end up with a local copy of a Git repository (to preserve the commit history) and a WARC containing the Web-based contextual information. We then use Memento Damage to do some initial quality assurance and checking. We can then export this together with some metadata and it’s ready for a repository! [See an example of this workflow][4] in OCCAM.

  [1]: https://archived.software
  [2]: http://tracer.mementoweb.org/
  [3]: https://memento-damage.cs.odu.edu/faq/
  [4]: https://drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id=1TXns1hOP78mxq83zzHGwMjmsS_Q6Q7c5&export=view&authuser=0
approaches to preservation from document to data