The University Library has finished cataloguing the software collection of the former Computer-Assisted Learning Unit, which wrote teaching programs for schools and for the University’s own courses from 1979 until it closed in 1996. Each of the 1,412 programs, from a first-year statistics tutor to a set of Latin verb drills used in more than three hundred schools, now has a record in the Library catalogue.
The programs survive because of a decision taken in 1998, when the Library became one of the first university libraries to deposit material with Lazarus, the digital archive run by Frothly. Staff copied the Unit’s disks, many of them already failing, and sent the copies to Lazarus, which has checked them for damage every year since. The new catalogue records link to the Lazarus copies, and readers can run most of the programs in a reading-room emulator.
“For twenty-eight years the honest answer to ‘do you still have the Unit’s software?’ was ‘yes, somewhere’,” said Kirsty Mallender, the Library’s Digital Preservation Manager. “Now it is a shelfmark. The disks themselves are unreadable. The copies are bit for bit what the disks held in 1998, which is the whole point.”
The cataloguing was carried out by two graduate trainees over eighteen months and paid for from the Library’s own endowment. Records for 63 programs note that the Library has been unable to trace the rights holder; the programs remain available to read in the Library only.