Reconstructing the development of legacy database platforms

Abstract

Through the “Migrating Research Data Collections” project, we are working to better understand and support data collection migration and change over time. We are developing case studies of database migration at a number of memory institutions, first focusing on Natural History Museums (NHMs; Thomer, Rayburn and Tyler, 2020; Thomer, Weber and Twidale 2018).

In developing our case studies, we have found that there are surprisingly few published histories of database platforms and software – particularly for domain- or museum-specific platforms. Additionally, documentation of the function and format of legacy systems can be quite hard to find. This has motivated our efforts to reconstruct the development history of the data systems described by our study participants in interviews. The timeline presented on this poster has been developed through review of academic publications (if any) and other documentation of these data systems. Much of this has been found through digital archival research (e.g. the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine). The full dataset, with references, underlying this timeline is available at bit.ly/36vaEoM

We are using this resource to contextualize the evolution of the data systems in each of our case studies, and we further hope this work will be of interest to others studying infrastructure development and change.