Software Preservation Network members will vote to fill open seats on our Coordinating Committee in 2023. Read more about these incredible software preservation practitioners, researchers, advocates, and all-around leaders below!
SPN and the Coordinating Committee
The Software Preservation Network launched as a sustained member-funded organization in 2021, after building as a volunteer network since 2017 and accelerating our instantiation through a seed-funded period in 2019-2020. The Coordinating Committee is the primary governing body of SPN. You can read the Committee’s charge here.
Meet the Candidates!
Dianne Dietrich
Dianne Dietrich is the Digital Assets Librarian at Cornell University Library, where she is part of the team that handles digital preservation for the library, consults with units throughout the library on sound practice, repository policy development, and assists in the development of workflow tools to handle digital material. Her role also encompasses the software preservation program at CUL. Dianne co-coordinates the SPN Metadata Working Group, is the current Secretary of the Coordinating Committee, and participates in the Community Engagement Collaborative. She earned her Master of Science Information degree from the University of Michigan.
Dianne got her start in software preservation at the library in 2013 with a grant preserving CD-ROM-based artworks and has been hooked ever since. Dianne says, “there is something magical about bringing old computing environments back to life to support research, learning, and understanding the technological moment we’re in now. I have found it extraordinarily gratifying to work with SPN over the last few years because it really demonstrates how much we can do when we pull all our resources together and approach software preservation holistically. This community has produced a wealth of information and guidance that organizations can use to start developing software preservation capacity at their own organizations, and I am eager to continue my participation on the team that helps to shape its direction and future development.”
Claire Fox
Claire Fox is a Digital Preservation Librarian at Yale University Library, where she works with a team that preserves digitized and born-digital content for units and stakeholders across Yale University. In her role, Claire oversees the administration, support, and expansion of Yale’s instance of the Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) program of work, and explores how the EaaSI system could be used in a variety of contexts to provide broader access to digital collections. Prior to her current role, Claire was the Metadata Analyst for the EaaSI program of work and was a post-graduate fellow on the audiovisual preservation-focused Regional Media Legacies Project. She received her MA from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program in 2020.
Claire was introduced to the field of software preservation in 2019, when she wrote documentation to describe the packaging and long-term preservation of emulated computing environments created in the EaaSI system as part of an internship with the EaaSI program. Since then, Claire has followed her interest in software preservation and software-dependent collections to a range of different projects, including her masters thesis on preserving born-digital camera original video formats, a collaborative effort to preserve an e-zine from the 1990s, and at present, co-coordinating the SPN Metadata Working Group. Claire hopes to expand her role within the SPN community and would welcome the opportunity to shape and support SPN’s organizational goals and strategies as a member of the Coordinating Committee.
Stan Gunn
Stan Gunn is the Executive Director for Information Technology at the University of Virginia Library, where he is responsible for meeting the technology needs of library staff and patrons. Over the course of his career Stan has been a systems administrator, a network engineer, a programmer, a database administrator, a project manager, and the chief information officer for two organizations. He has taught as an adjunct faculty at the UT School of Information for over twenty years, leading graduate students on topics such as open source programming, database design and data management. Stan received his MLIS from the University of Texas School of Information in 1997.
Stan has worked in the information technology field for over thirty years and understands both the challenges and benefits of maintaining legacy software and platforms. His research interests in his doctoral program centered on long term digital preservation. Stan has closely followed and supported UVA’s contributions to the EaaSI project. He has also contributed his time and effort in finding viable methods of preserving digital humanities projects hosted at the University of Virginia. Stan understands the importance of the pioneering work done by the Software Preservation Network and wants to continue to assist in building and maintaining its future as a healthy and vibrant organization. He served as Treasurer on the 2022 Coordinating Committee.
Wendy Hagenmaier
Wendy Hagenmaier is the Digital Curation Archivist at the Georgia Tech Library, where she leads the development of workflows for preserving and providing access to born-digital archives and manages the Library’s retroTECH initiative, which engages the campus community in hands-on experiences with historical technologies. Wendy is passionate about how collaboration among organizations and individuals sustains and advances digital stewardship work. She earned her M.S. in Information Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.
Wendy brings a longstanding commitment to SPN, having served as a member of SPN’s Research-in-Practice Working Group since 2017, Co-Chair of the Membership & Executive Subcommittee of SPN’s Steering Committee (2019-2020), and lead for Georgia Tech’s Fostering a Community of Practice project (2019-2020). She served as Strategic Coordinator on the Coordinating Committee in 2022 and is excited about continuing to contribute to SPN’s strategy and sustainability, expanding SPN’s potential to empower individuals working across diverse domains of software preservation activities.
Daniel Johnson
Daniel is interim co-director of the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship in the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame, and also a subject librarian. He promotes an expansive definition of “textual technologies,” from manuscripts to micro-computing, in research and teaching. He co-founded the library’s Legacy Technology Collection, which provides operable hardware and software from decades past and facilitates interaction between old computers and new. His research includes 18th- and 19th-century literature, DH and DH preservation, and retro computing. He has a PhD in English Literature from Princeton University.
Daniel served on the Coordinating Committee of the Software Preservation Network in 2022-2023, and is eager to continue helping set a solid foundation for the committee’s and the Network’s future work.
Larry Masinter
Dr. Larry Masinter is a computer scientist (Principal Scientist, Adobe & Xerox PARC) with a focus on document processing, metadata, long-term archiving, and Web standards. Currently, he leads a non-profit 501(c)3, open-source project, Interlisp.org, to restore early research work in programming tools and AI.
Technologies (AI, VR) are changing the boundaries of what is art or archivable. “Software Eats the World.” Software preservation becomes crucial for memory institutions.
Cynde Moya
Dr. Cynde Moya is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne Australia, where she directs the Digital Heritage Lab. Dr. Moya is a digital archivist and forensic conservator focused on vintage software preservation and emulation.
I, Cynde Moya, have been involved in the Software Preservation Network (SPN) from its inception. SPN has helped me move from curious but disoriented to an international leader in the field of software preservation and emulation. As a member of the SPN coordinating committee, I will bring the knowledge and resources of SPN to Australasian information professionals, and share our findings and build relationships with our colleagues in the US.