The 2024 Angela Dappert Memorial Award in Digital Preservation has gone to Klaus Rechert, Dragan Espenschied, Rafael Gieschke, and Wendy Hagenmaier for the work reported in their iPres 2024 paper “Preserving Users’ Knowledge of Contemporary and Legacy Computer Systems.”

I felt that this paper signals a shift in the way that the digital preservation community is thinking about emulation technology as well as capturing knowledge about legacy computer systems and software. Emulation methods have become more common in long-term digital archiving environments. They make it possible to run and interact with legacy software and data that ran on machines that may be long since retired and difficult to find outside of a computing museum.

But as the people who knew how to use those systems become older and, sadly, rarer a new challenge emerges: How can we capture and preserve their knowledge of how to use these systems? Most of the approaches that people have explored looked at extensive manual documentation and video recordings. Rechart and his co-authors have taken a different approach. They record interaction events between a user and a system and then use large language models to reformulate and summarize these event records. This may make an enormous reduction in the cost of preserving this legacy information. I’m looking forward to their next steps as well as learning if these techniques for uncovering tacit knowledge apply in other areas.

I was able to present the award at the 2024 iPres conference in Ghent, Belgium.