Determine the long-term maintenance impact of automated catalog generation

Determine whether automated generation of the PASUMS research-software catalog reduces long-term maintenance effort rather than shifting that effort from writing records to reviewing them.

Background

The PASUMS catalog demonstrates that the catalog generator can be adapted to a different repository organization, branding scheme, data source, and publication policy. However, the system had not operated for a sufficient period to establish whether automation reduces the total burden of maintaining accurate catalog information. The unresolved issue is whether automation produces a genuine long-term efficiency gain or merely changes the type of human labor required.

References

However, it has not yet operated long enough to determine whether automated generation actually reduces long-term maintenance effort rather than shifting that effort from writing records to reviewing them.

— Building a research-software catalog with a coding agent: from hackathon prototype to public deployment  (2609.04711 - Yoshimi et al., 4 Sep 2026) in Section 4.3, subsection “From prototype to sustainable operation”