Containerisation is a hot topic for increasing reproducibility of
research. A container can capture a complex computing environment in the
exact state that was just to run a scientific workflow. Based on
containers, infrastructures are build for researchers to improve
communication, collaboration, and reproducibility. With the increasing
use of containers they are likely to become a topic for research
librarians, albeit their background of scalable cloud information
technology being distincly incompatible with traditional services and
perspectives of libraries. Nevertheless, libraries could provide
guidelines for container usage and build infrastructures to leverage the
advantages of a containerised workflow, but they might also have to
handle container-related artefacts as products of research projects. In
this talk, I give an introduction into the basics of containerisation
and examine the innards of container image formats (Docker/OCI image,
Singularity image) and how these images are created (Dockerfile, build
scripts, duality of image and Dockerfile). Further I point to the state
of the art in container preservation. Based on my perspective as a
research software engineer, I speculate on the potential and the
challenges for container archival and preservation, and how in ten years
a container image might help the inspection of research published today.