Preservation Metadata for Software - Describing Software in Archives.

Software preservation is concerned with the long-term storage of and access to computer programs in order to keep software alive. As archival objects, software presents us with many challenges. The notion of software covers a huge variety of applications that have complex relationships with often specific hard- and software environments that are maybe considered quite standard at the time of release, but over time become obsolete. In order for archived software to remain accessible we need a lot of information about the original environments in which the software worked at the time of release so that it can be reconstructed, either by using original hard- and software or, more likely, by setting up an emulation of the original environment. This report addresses the challenges of how to capture information about the original environment in (preservation) metadata.