Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
Does anybody know if anywhere is actively collecting/preserving this kind of material? Obviously the Oxford Text Archive does collect texts--but in the pre-internet and early SGML days, you also had information machines where content was very closely associated with software (for a discussion of one famous case see: http://www.mun.ca/mst/heroicage/issues/7/ecolumn.html).
Internet Archive (proprietors of the Wayback Machine) is universally interested in what is and was on the Internet, whether incunabula or not, and one can upload all kinds of material--text, images, audio, video. The "item creation" page is at http://www.archive.org/create/ Archive has racks of terabyte boxes--that is, plenty of space. The trick is to identify the material properly so that it can be located, if necessary, by filename alone (the format is http://www.archive.org/details/YourIdentifierName). As at most digital libraries or repositories, cataloging info or metadata may be sparse and, even then, not readily findable. Longterm accessibility is a big problem if the material exists but can't be located.
Archive suggests going to Creative Commons and using the ccPublisher tool to add a license to the material. (In brief, "Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. [The] licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a 'some rights reserved' copyright.") http://creativecommons.org/learnmore
If you acquired some public domain text from a long-defunct computer source, you can generally pass it along as such. But if, say, you have a translation or transcription in a WordStar doc acquired from a colleague now dead, some investigation and negotiation would be in order. All such resource recovery efforts are praiseworthy!
Cheers, Al Magary