(SINGING) There's a gray one and a gray one And a gray one and a gray one And they're all made out of cardboard And they all are acid free
[TELEVISION, "FRICTION"]
You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And my headphones don't work on one side. And we couldn't find them until about ten seconds before. It's exciting here in the studio right now.
We're also missing some pages from our documents.
Missing pages. There's a fan on that I'm only just now hearing. It's crazy. But you are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with gremlins and Fred and Marlee and Alex and a player to be named just in a moment. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it.
Today's show is called Old Friend, New Job. Whenever we hire a new faculty member at the Georgia Tech Library, we like to introduce them to you with shows like New Library, New Librarian or New Librarian, New Challenge or New Metadata, New Librarian.
I'm sorry, did you make one of those up?
Probably. But today we're messing with the formula a bit. There's an old friend in the studio. And we're going to talk to her about her new, or new-ish, job.
And while we often keep the guest's name and voice out of the introduction, I think, we think it would be appropriate to name this particular guest and let her get on mic.
Because she's not just an old friend, she's a Lost in Stacks alumnus. MARLEE GIVENS: Wendy's in the studio.
Woo-hoo!
Hey.
Hey, y'all. Great to be back.
All right. Let's get this show going for real, Wendy. And you're going to get a full introduction when we get to our interview segment.
Today, we'll be playing songs from many different eras, but especially highlighting some standards from crooners and from the Great American Songbook. And our songs are about sustaining something good, teamwork, and the deja vu of how it feels to interact with something from years ago. It's also kind of deja vu having Wendy back on the show.
Deja vu all over again-- vuja de.
Let's start with "Deja Vu," by Ray, Goodman & Brown, right here on Lost in the Stacks.
[RAY, GOODMAN & BROWN, "DEJA VU"]
(SINGING) Deja vu, deja vu, deja vu Sounds crazy but it's true
That was "Deja Vu," by Ray Goodman & Brown. Our show today is called Old Friend, New Job. And that old friend is Wendy Hagenmaier, an archivist and a previous member of the Lost in the Stacks show crew. Her new job is software preservation program manager at the Yale University Library, where her main focus is, and I quote, "designing and operationalizing a strategy to sustain and grow emulation as a service infrastructure."
Wendy, it's been so long since I got to say this. Let's unpack that focus. OK.
I knew it. I was like, when is Charlie going to say, unpack? I cannot wait.
You can cross that off your bingo card right now. OK. So if we go back into the focus, let's start from the last part. What is emulation as a service and its infrastructure?
Sure. Yeah, so Emulation as a Service and Infrastructure can be more easily referred to as EaaSI, if that's a mouthful, which it is. So the idea of EaaSI is to make it easier for archivists, librarians, working in libraries, archives, museums, to utilize emulation as a strategy for preservation and access to software-dependent digital materials or software itself.
I feel like the first time I heard about emulation as an archival practice of some kind was Salman Rushdie's computer. Yeah, the archivists just all nodded, yes, that's correct-- at Emory, Alex says. That was the first time I heard about it. And it was just the trying to recreate the actual box itself or what was in the computer. But then knowing some of your work with retroTECH, emulation goes a lot farther than that, right?
Yeah. So yeah, but that is a great example, the Rushdie collection emulation. So I can't even remember-- that was more than a decade ago. I don't remember what year. But that project was such an amazing example of what's possible with emulation, which is this idea of-- very not technically speaking-- using modern hardware and software to emulate or approximate or reenact older hardware and software, so bringing computing environments back to life, using modern computing environments.
And I think one of the lessons learned from that Emory, the Rushdie project, was that that's really hard. That's technical work. There's intellectual property concerns. There's just resource constraints and libraries that make that really hard to repeat or even think about, in the first place. So the idea with EaaSI is to reduce some of those barriers so that emulation is a more approachable strategy for anyone working in libraries who wants to explore it.
So the problem that comes to my mind, which is probably not the most interesting problem, is something like you can't get Windows software to run on a Mac unless you have some emulator behind that. And I've never gotten that to work right. Is that the kind of thing you're talking about?
Yeah.
Or what are the bigger challenges?
That would fit within the landscape of virtualization and emulation and this idea of trying to run a computing environment on another computing environment, so yeah, definitely related for sure. But when you sort of stop and think about how software-dependent our world has become, you could go back and think about the first email you ever sent, and that experience was--
I do not want to think about the first email I ever sent.
Censored. That experience was created within a software landscape. But we have all kinds of files. We're making works of art, works of literature. It's all being made with software. And so being able to preserve access to that is really important.
When I worked at Portman Architects, we talked a lot about AutoCAD and the challenges of AutoCAD files. Because as design firms have moved forward with technology, these AutoCAD files, they're software dependent. And you have to have that license. And it's changed. And we knew we were preserving them, but we had no idea what we were going to do with them after a certain point.
Right. Yeah, can you open the file? Yeah, totally. So architecture is a great use case, commonly occurring for a lot of people, or digital artworks, scientific reproducibility. Software preservation is important to any digital file that you're preserving, but there are these key use cases where you start to see the essential nature of software preservation really quickly.
And calling it a service and an infrastructure, is that not doing it with individual things, but having emulation and being able to go back to old software just be a regular, everyday occurrence?
Yeah. So I think the structure of that emulation as a service infrastructure or emulation as a service is modeling off of software as a service, so this SaaS model or infrastructure as a service; so this idea that there is a tool that enables you to gain access to emulation environments to build them, and all you're using as your web browser. So it's remote emulation that's occurring on servers, not on your local machine, thereby just making it technically a lot easier for people.
They don't have to learn how to use an emulator, et cetera, et cetera, or install things on their local computer. They're accessing all of it through a browser.
And is this something that Yale developed? WENDY HAGENMAIER: Great question.
[LAUGHTER]
EaaSI has a long history, technological origin story. So it is scaffolded on top of an open source project called Emulation as a Service, which is a code base that was developed at the University of Freiburg, in Germany. And then there was a spin off corporation established in Germany, called Open SLX, which has become the maintainer of Emulation as a Service, so easy as building off of that core code base.
--our software preservation program manager at Yale University Library. And it's time for a music set.
And you can file this set under Z701.3.C65.
Is this all coming back to you, Wendy?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That was "Where Or When," by Ella Fitzgerald. And before that, we heard kind of the opposite, Zeroes and Ones, by Sixes, songs about interacting with software and remembering what it's like to interact with something from years ago.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "Old Friend, New Job." And our guest is Wendy Hagenmaier, software preservation program manager at-- wait a minute-- at Yale University Library.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Wow, that's a hop, skip, and a jump from Georgia Tech. But you didn't actually fly in for the show, did you?
No. I flew in from Yale South, Atlanta. Grateful to be a remote worker.
The modern working scenario, a remote worker for Yale University Library. So in the last segment, we were talking about preservation of software and via emulation of that software, which is your role. But can you tell us a little bit about, What's your specific role in getting that moving? What are the logistics that you do?
Sure. Yeah, so as the software preservation program manager, my main focus lately-- so EaaSI and the EaaSI program of work has been funded jointly by the Mellon and Sloan foundations very generously for the last, I think, six years. So at this moment, we are aiming to sustain EaaSI beyond grant funding and moving towards a sustainability pathway and operationalizing this startup world of grant funding that we've been in.
So I've been thinking a lot about what it means to sustain something and move it from early experimental work into something that's adopted in a more mainstream way and also, how much collaboration and collective action that's going to require. So I'm really thinking a lot about sustainability planning and executing that plan for Yale and for the community. CHARLIE BENNETT: Is the main concern when the funding dries up? And are you going to go to an ad-based model? Top secret.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, yeah, obviously, resources are required to sustain open source software, but also, just for people to have time to engage with it at all. So we're thinking very holistically about what does sustainability look like? And very frankly, aware of the challenges and the "this is going to be hard." So the resourcing is one question. But the sustainability has to involve the community in such a strong way here because this is a collective endeavor.
No single institution can collect all the software in the world. That's impossible. So we have to go in this together. And so I'm thinking a lot about how we do that, and how we engage people with EaaSI, and how we make it something useful for them. CHARLIE BENNETT: And you're talking about the global community of people doing this work, right? Yes. Yeah, in the US. But yeah, quite broadly.
So there's a strong community of EaaSI users in Australia, fondly known as AusEaaSI, which is an effort that's being spearheaded by Melanie Swalwell there, who's amazing. And they're working on a lot of digital artwork, preservation use cases. So Yeah, it really is a global endeavor. CHARLIE BENNETT: Almost like you're trying to get people to think about it and get them to use it. What's the block here for expanding and sustaining? And I know there's a lot.
But what's the first one that comes to mind? Well, I think it's connecting. Emulation and software preservation can sound like a nice to have, I think, to a lot of people who the reality is that libraries and archives and museums are very understaffed, underresourced, and that's a chronic systemic problem. So I think part of the work is building a tool that addresses a problem that people have in the moment and meets a need that those stakeholders need fulfilled. And those problems exist.
They're increasing demand for access to born- digital archives or reproducibility mandates from federal governments for federally-funded research. There are pressing problems that need to be solved right now the emulation can help with. So it's a matter of building a tool that meets those needs that people have right now. And then the whole hope is that we will increase adoption.
And by using EaaSI, that will be a way to come together in this collective action of software preservation and preserving access to software. So EaaSI becomes a vehicle for this broader challenge that we're all in together of, we need to be collecting software, and there are a lot of barriers.
Are you getting a good amount of buy-in from partners? Because I'm going to point out, for people who may not have listened to Lost in the Stacks for the past 9 or 10 =. When you were involved with it, you did. You produced episodes. You talked about this issue a lot on our show and in your professional life. And so you are really plugged in already. You came into this job very plugged into these issues. So you know how to talk about it and communicate it.
So are you able to get folks to buy in and get that team, that collaboration, going?
Yeah. Yeah, I have been interested in software preservation for a long time. And I think a lot of people are. But I also feel like a bit of an anomaly that there's also a lot of archivists out there who don't necessarily identify as interested in software preservation. But once you start to connect the dots about how emulation could be useful or how they are contributing to software preservation in the very work that they're doing, then it opens pathways for collaboration.
So yeah, I'm very optimistic that we will be able to collaborate with this. I think I came here wrestling with these ideas of sustainability being hard and collaboration being hard. And I was like, maybe I can seek some wisdom from folks who have sustained a radio show for a long time.
You came to the right place.
[LAUGHTER]
You said that some archivists don't think it's necessary or that it's just not in their purview.
Not top priority at the moment.
Are they not recognizing the need for the tool, or are they not recognizing the need to go to media and software that's, quote, unquote, "dead?"
Alex, do you want to weigh in?
Yeah. I guess I will say, I think we all recognize there's a need. But with all digital archives, it's like, this is another mountain to climb. And I think the appeal of EaaSI is this idea of, oh my gosh, this may demystify it some. And is it the more we talk about it, the more we normalize it as just this another resource that's already there that we can use and harness. The more we do it, the more it'll become natural for us. I don't know.
Yeah. I think that makes sense. I mean, it's just like we're competing. There's so many projects. There's so many priorities for archivists-- like infinite. And yeah, you have to make a tool seem very relevant in the moment and demystified and approachable.
And usually, the first obstacle for most archivists is just getting the files, the data, first and convincing someone that this is worth preserving. So that's the first battle. And then it's the, OK, crap, now what do we do?
[LAUGHTER]
Exactly, yeah. And hopefully, maybe getting the files would be made easier by saying, we're trustworthy to preserve them.
We already have this. WENDY HAGENMAIER: We have tools that can open this architectural file in 10 years, or whatever.
Is this team exclusively archivists? WENDY HAGENMAIER: You're allowed, Fred.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I was thinking along the lines of, when you're talking about software preservation, you might also be thinking about folks that might not necessarily have an academic archive background, but have an IT background. And so you come at it with different priorities, different histories. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that collective endeavor that is software preservation is very multidisciplinary.
And so just for example, EaaSI leverages emulators that are built, many of them-- the history of them is that they have been built by hobbyist communities, experts and tinkerers who are interested in video games, for example. So even in the stack of EaaSI itself, there is that trace of coming together across domains of expertise. But certainly, scientific researchers have a stake in this. It's not just archivists.
It seems like the most easily understood use cases are pop culture. And the other use cases are harder to explain in a pitch. So you have to go after the people who are maybe the least interested in how archives work, but are most interested in getting a video game that they played when they were children.
Yeah. I mean, video game enthusiasts have been driving preservation for decades. They're really on the frontier. And thank you, video game enthusiasts. So absolutely.
You are listening to Lost in the Stacks. And we'll hear more from Wendy Hagenmaier on the left side of the hour.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Eira Tansey, trouble-making archivist. You're listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta. I think I'm good.
Classic.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's episode is called "Old Friend, New Job." And in the pre-production, I found myself in an archive fever, going down the rabbit hole of discussions of archival practice and software emulation. In one of the bends in the tunnel, I found a 2021 article by Amelia Acker titled "Emulation practices for software preservation in libraries, archives, and museums" So I want to read you all a section.
"Emulation with the goal of preserving a disk image, for example, involves planning for unknown and unpredictable results, such as a missing manual with a software license key, encountering a corrupted blank floppy disk, or locating the necessary disk drive adapter.
Emulation for preservation workflows often involve looping back or beginning again with recovery and reconstruction tests, repeating serialized trial and error work in order to refine the proper tool chain and process steps to successfully accomplish the digital preservation goal in a repeatable, reliable emulation process.
These specific workflow processes would then be documented in project management documents, such as lab notebooks, spreadsheets, and manuals for future team members managing emulation projects. Such initial diagnostics or mysteries are incredibly time-consuming for preservationists and can often lead to discouraging outcomes or incremental successes.
When asked about estimating a typical day for emulation for preservation, one interviewee responsible for software curation at the museum reported."
"All day, six software titles copied to work on the exhibition floor is a really good day for this preservation workflow. A bad day is spending the whole day on one thing and only getting a sense of whether the issue is media, format copy, or an emulator issue."
File this set under some kind of emulation of T14.5.D474.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is "Always," by Cab Calloway. And before that, "Keep on rolling on," by Shirley & Company, songs about the effort to keep things moving forward.
[LAUGHTER]
This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "Old Friend, New Job." Our guest is Wendy Hagenmaier, software preservation program manager at Yale University Library. And it's lovely to see you. We're glad you came back to visit.
Likewise.
But it turns out you have an agenda. You brought a question.
This is where I get to interview you all. OK, I was like, Thank goodness I get to see these awesome Lost in the Stacks folks because I need some advice. So I think we've been talking a little bit about how I'm thinking about sustainability, and What does that mean? So I'm just curious to hear your takes on-- I guess any examples you've seen or been a part of sustaining something that you've started. And what's challenging about that?
Or what worked out well, any insights, but also, any advice you might have about collaboration across libraries that you've seen to work particularly well or be very nurturing to you as a professional.
We should probably restart the show, do the whole hour. No. So we're turning 15 pretty soon, Lost in the Stacks. And so if you look at this crew right here, there's only one original member of the Lost in the Stacks team. Everybody who--
And that's you.
That's me. Hey. And everybody who's come into this has had different ideas about what was important or what had to be just right and what could be loose. And I have learned that when you can't do it all yourself, and you have to have a team to do some of it, You. Also have to let that team decide how those things work. The ghost of a meet can say, loose fit long life.
But it also means that your process or your ideal outcome for your team, it's always going to change every time someone new arrives. And leaning into that, and embracing it, and letting yourself be changed by it allows things to continue. Because if I just kept saying, no, it needs to be like this, everybody, I think no one would want to be on the show, and no one would want to continue this process. So I guess my advice is relax.
No, my advice is, roll with it when you're challenged with your expectations of how things are going to work. Because people have good ideas. People have-- oh, Marlee, because your baby's ugly.
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
What? What? CHARLIE BENNETT: Marlee's baby's ugly. No. This is something she talked about.
You just have to be cool with-- you either have to be cool with letting people call your baby ugly, or have to jump in and work on someone else's baby, which, to me, is probably the more rewarding. I was thinking about a collaboration that I could talk about. And I was going to give the advice of like having a strong mission statement, which I think Lost in the Stacks does, has a strong mission statement.
And I was part of a collaboration that ended up having all kinds of issues because everyone was coming into it with their own mission and their own agenda. And it was really tough because we ended up trying to please everyone. Instead, we pleased no one. And then we ended up just shutting it down. So learn from that. And manage the scope. That's the other thing. I know it's exciting. As you start to share this with people, they will get excited about, What can this do for me?
And managing that long game and being patient and saying, well, no, we're going to work on this thing now, and then we'll eventually get to your thing.
Wisdom.
So I was thinking about being in a very similar position to you of leaving what's comfortable and what I know for something I believe in and how I went to go be the Women at MIT Project archivist, which was term, and I was the first. And what we had was a very loose understanding of what our donors wanted and not too much in place and starting with something, but building something and eventually leaving.
And I actually was just talking to the person that took over after me and this idea of what we both have done in our time there and contributed to. And I think it came down to the idea that we both believed that it was important, and it mattered and having that passion behind the work. And I do think, to what Marlee was saying, that's infectious. People can tell when you care. And that also will bring the boys to the yard.
And by the way, to hear more about that Women at MIT Project, a future Lost in the Stacks episode.
A hint of what's to come. Some stuff that y'all were just talking about reminded me about another thing about Lost in the Stacks. Every time we complete a show, that's a small success within the larger mission. And so I don't think we ever feel like, Oh my gosh, we haven't gotten anything done. We're not moving forward. Because there's an established success, a win almost every week. And I mean, really, every week. A rerun is a win because look, we got a week back in our lives.
But having that kind of structure where your big goal is built of a lot of things, and there's no way we could accomplish all of that. But yeah, these bit-sized pieces, every week there's a show. And that pushes us and keeps anybody from saying, Why am I doing this? I Nothing cool has happened in a month.
I think the most compelling thing I've ever heard about teamwork, the most compelling anecdote that informs how I think about it when I'm working either with colleagues or here in the library or elsewhere, John Lennon and Paul McCartney had a working dynamic. And Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for the Rolling Stones had a working dynamic. The Lennon-McCartney one was brilliant, produced a lot of great work. It was done in 10 years, and they didn't speak very much after that.
And Jagger and Richards continued for decades and decades. And someone asked Mick Jagger once why that was, why he thought that was. And Mick Jagger thought about it a little bit. He said, every team needs a leader, implying that there was too much tension in Lennon and McCartney. Whereas, Mick Jagger, obviously, assumed himself the leader--
[LAUGHTER]
of the Rolling Stones. And that was compelling to me because the sustainability of the Rolling Stones, that was how Mick Jagger thought about the sustainability of the Rolling Stones. And don't forget, Mick Jagger thought that everybody was his drummer, guitarist, bass player. But they all thought that he was their singer.
So can I come back any week and seek advice? This is like everything I ever needed to learn, I learned from Lost in the Stacks people.
Thank you. This is Lost in the Stacks, and our guest today is Wendy Hagenmaier. She is software preservation program manager at the Yale University Library, and archivist, and a previous member of the Lost in the Stacks show crew. Wendy, thank you so much for being on the show. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Thanks for having me.
File this set under HD 66.G377. (SINGING) Well, I want more stage and to get out of this place.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We just heard "Teamwork," by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope and then before that, "Teamwork High Five Awesome," by The Awesomes, and then before that, "On My Team," by The Babies, songs about collaborative teamwork.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today's show is called "Old Friend, New Job." And we spoke with our former colleague Wendy Hagenmaier about her job as software preservation program manager. And as we head into the credits, I want to ask everybody, What's a piece of media or a software that is gone, dead, that you really miss? And Wendy, I want to hear your answer first.
Well, there's this one software program that actually, I have seen in emulation in EaaSI. It's called Kid Pix, and it's for making art if you're a kid in the early '90s. And there's these awesome sounds when you stamp stuff. And you can hear those sounds again in emulation. And it's just like, yes.
Wow. Fred?
I'm going to go with reel-to-reel tape technology.
I doubt. I mean, the technology is there. I doubt this game is. There was a Spice World game for the Spice World movie. It was awesome. I don't think any video gamers are probably lining up to save that one.
Might spice up your life.
Might spice up your life.
I've got another one. My family bought a very cheap, off-brand video game console in the mid-'80s. I, all of a sudden, remembered that we had that. And I would love to play one of those dumb games again.
Do you remember the name of it?
Well, it was a Magnavox. I don't remember what the names of any of the games were.
Mine was Intellivision, which was the Atari competitor-- it was the Betamax to Atari's VHS. But yeah, I miss that, that one.
I think the library has one, Charlie.
Seriously? Oh, OK, I need the key to that cabinet. Oh, roll the credits before I incriminate myself.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Alex McGee, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens.
Legal counsel and solid fair use arguments for software replication provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.
Special thanks to Wendy for coming back to see the studio, to everybody in digital preservation services at Yale University Library. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.
Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks, where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form, if you want to get in touch with us.
Next week, our show is about integrating improv techniques into teaching. Whose grade is it anyway?
Aha. Time for our last song today, and time for one more from the Great American Songbook. And because Wendy was always one for ending any meeting, project, or Lost in the Stacks episode with optimism, let's close the same way. From 1944, this is "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive," by Johnny Mercer and the Pied Pipers, right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) Gather round me, everybody.