‘The Visible Ear’ CD

In a week where much of the focus was on studying and collecting objects related to contemporary biomedical science, this object highlights a particular problem that late twentieth century science poses to the museum curator (and one that nobody I’ve spoken to seems to have a solution to). While big, hard-to-store objects and opaque ‘black box’ objects can be found in any period, the last few decades are particularly difficult because of the predominance of software.
What is the real object here? Is it the cd, or is that just a storage device for the actual ‘objects’, the images you get when you run the software? But these only appear when you put the cd into your computer and run the program, and they are gone as soon as you shut down. So how can we collect something that isn’t really there? Is the object the computer code that creates the program in which the images are realized? So do we keep printouts of the code? But there are so many programs in use, containing millions of lines of code, that our archives would overflow. In any case, looking at code on paper doesn’t give us a sense of how this tool is actually used by scientists. But nor does looking at the cd, and it will be even more meaningless when cds are long obsolete and few people are familiar with how they were used to store and show data.
So do we have to collect a whole ‘platform’ around the object, so that we can keep it running on a computer and we can see the images? But where does the platform stop – do you just collect the scientist’s computer, or the desk and chair, the whole lab? Or the office where the computer programmer completed the final version? And what happens when we can’t keep the software running on the computer any more, when the system fails and there are no longer any compatible operating systems or devices to be found?
Do we decide that collecting software is just too problematic, and avoid it (perhaps just collecting the packaging as an archival reference)? But how can we ignore something that has transformed how scientists work?
Help!