Hello Gene,

I have no direct experience of this, but was recently stimulated to think
about the issue of software code as record by an interesting post on the
blog 'Gaming The Past', which is concerned with the use of games (including
video games) as an educational tool in understanding history and the past.
http://www.playthepast.org/?p=1519

The post, by Mark Sample, deals with the code for the video game 'JFK:
Reloaded', and specifically with the non-functional comment code inserted by
the programmers which, as Sample notes, offers contextual and interpretive
background to the game itself:
---
"The game ... is also a historical artifact itself. In other words, the game
emerges out of a specific time and place, textured by the touch of countless
hands. I want to look at a very precise kind of texture, the human-readable
comments that appear in the code in one of the two WAD files that comprise
JFK Reloaded‘s game assets. ...

Code comments pose a number of interesting epistemological challenges. They
are ignored by the machine interpreter and readable by humans, but not
exactly legible. They are visible only if one is able to view the source
code. They are not intended for the end-user, but with the right tools, the
end-user might find them. ... We can think of code comments as a kind of
textual marginalia—the doodles, notes, and corrections that authors and
readers add in the margins of a text. ... The marginalia in JFK Reloaded‘s
WAD file ... [helps] us to make sense of the individual lines of code that
follow the comment, but also offering an interpretative gloss on the code."
---
On reading this it struck me that while as records managers we could hardly
justify saving every piece of code written in our organizations, the code
undeniably constitutes a record of organizational activity, in cases even an
evidentially or historically important record. In which case, we really
should have some sort of policy for its retention and destruction: perhaps
identifying software that is of core significance to the organization's
mission or activities, and saving that as a long-term or permanent record?

For an organization whose primary function is the creation of software and
computer programs, I'd expect that the code would be kept as a record in any
case, in the same way that a publisher would keep a copy of each book that
they published as a record, even if to any other organization it would
merely be reference material. However, the context described by Sample could
apply to any organization that developed software, even if only for internal
use; I don't know how widespread the practice of writing the sort of
comments described above is, or how rich the content of such comments tends
to be – perhaps it varies between sectors?

Anyway, I don't know if this helps you at all, but I suppose it shows that
at least someone 'out there' has been thinking of software as a record. It
also suggests (judging by the examples quoted in the blog post) that
comments made in programming code should be covered by communication and
recordkeeping policies to make sure that they are in line with
organizational standards and would not cause embarrassment if disclosed.

Kind Regards,

Rachel Hardiman

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