Curating a collection of software

A substantial part of my professional background lies in collections management - mostly archival or museum.
I showed an early aptitude for this when I began cataloging my Mother's collection of comic books from her adolescence, circa late 1960's-early 1970's. Gingerly manipulating back issues of Action Comics into Mylar baggies was great preparation for my future work-life.

In graduate school, I learned that the most important skill of a curator is learning when to refuse a new item, or when to downsize a collection.
The lines between curator, collector, and hoarder are precious thin, and your institution's budget should be respected by not acquiring items that do not contribute to your organization's mission.

• A curator should accumulate and maintain a collection to the highest standards available to their skills, workplace, and profession. 
• A collector accumulates based on theme and desire. 
• A hoarder...just accumulates things. 

Don't be a collector or hoarder. That lies on the path to neglecting what matters most - the collection.

This outlook is so all-consuming for me that I do this in my spare time for friends. One friend is accumulating a research collection of games (digital and analog) for a major university, so I'm doing my best advising him how to go about things. Of course, he's worked in major museums internationally, so who am I to talk about this stuff?

When putting together a collection of games, software, or other material that is wholly or partially digital:

• Having a collecting strategy is important, especially since you're dealing with a variety of item types, from software, to boxes filled with tiny things, to books. 
• Usage of online software archives is a good thing for software, especially if you can get permission from the webmasters of said archives to download their stuff onto your server. That negates many of the issues of preserving data on obsolete formats like Floppy disks, as much of the work has already been done for you. 
• You'll want a mission statement for collections, as nobody stays at an institution forever - have everything in writing; leave nothing in your head. 
• Any collection of digital content needs a mix of stuff that's not for sale anymore, doesn't work on current machines, etc. This is known as AbandonWare or Orphaned Works. 
• It's super-fortunate that this problem is being (partially) solved with the rash of Remastered Editions, Humble Bundles, Gog.com, Archive.org efforts, etc. However, availability is of course a fickle thing, as shown by Alan Wake, which now unavailable on all online sales due to its soundtrack-licensing deals expiring, and the publisher being unable to renew them as of yet. 
• The other challenge for a collecting strategy (as you've likely noticed by now) is whether to collect the well-known, the exemplars of the genre, the innovative, the obscure, or some combination of the above. Connoisseurs of pretty much anything will inevitably encounter noble junk (good ideas poorly executed). As a repository for research purposes, you can choose to include content that is an evolutionary "dead end," critical success/commercial failure, etc.
• Don't automatically-reject commercial successes out of hand, merely that such content must have some other feature that merits their inclusion within the collection.  
• Another question of collection strategy is selecting what to collect from a franchise. The first or most recent entry in a franchise may not be the one most meritorious of inclusion. Choose the entry that exemplifies the entire franchise, or the entry that is most innovative. 
• So which of these do you acquire for the collection? That must be answered and articulated by you.