Software Preservation Network members will vote to fill open seats on our Coordinating Committee in 2022. Read more about these incredible software preservation practitioners, researchers, advocates, and all-around leaders below!
More about 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 their charge here. You can see the current goals that they are driving SPN towards here.
More about 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, which includes consulting with units throughout the library on sound practice, repository policy development, and development of workflow tools to handle digital material. Her role also includes development of a software preservation program at CUL, and most recently was a participant in SPN’s EaaSI Hosted Pilot. Dianne co-coordinates the Metadata Working Group and 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 nine years ago with a grant preserving digital artworks on CD-ROM, and has been hooked ever since. Dianne says, “there is something magical about bringing old computing environments back to life, especially 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 be part of the team that helps to shape its direction and future development.”
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 assist in building and maintaining its future as a healthy and vibrant organization.
Wendy Hagenmaier
Wendy Hagenmaier is the Digital Collections Archivist at the Georgia Tech Library, where she leads the development of workflows for preserving and delivering born-digital archives and manages the Library’s retroTECH initiative. 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 has been an active member of SPN’s Research-in-Practice Working Group since 2017 and formerly served as Membership & Executive Subcommittee Co-Chair of SPN’s Steering Committee (2019-2020) and lead for Georgia Tech’s Fostering a Community of Practice project (2019-2020). As a member of the Coordinating Committee, Wendy would seek to achieve the strategic actions defined by the 2021 Committee, bringing both longstanding commitment to the SPN community and renewed perspective gained since serving on SPN Steering in 2020. She would aim to explore and expand SPN’s potential to empower individuals working across diverse domains of software preservation activities.
Daniel Johnson
Daniel is English; Digital Humanities; and Film, Television, and Theatre Librarian at the University of Notre Dame, where 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 is relatively new to the Software Preservation Network, and sees great potential for further integrating software preservation priorities with digital humanities, digital scholarship, and media studies communities more broadly. His goal is to strengthen a productive back-and-forth whereby researchers proactively design projects with digital preservation at the forefront and also incorporate existing digital productions into scholarship through emulation (such as EaaSI) and other digital forensics methods. He is excited to support the work and expand the influence of the SPN.
Eric Kaltman
Dr. Eric Kaltman is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at California State University Channel Islands. He designs tools and methodologies for the historical analysis of software and computer games. He directs the Software History Futures and Technologies (SHFT) research group at CI. He has received support from the IMLS and NEH for software preservation related research, most notably the Game and Metadata Citation Project from 2014-2018.
Eric is the co-coordinator for the Technological Infrastructure Working Group and has participated in SPN activities for the last 5 years, a pioneer of the volunteer period before the Software Preservation Network was a member-funded community. He has been involved in software preservation activities at numerous institutions over the past decade or so, both in a library liaison role and as a software preservation researcher. Eric is qualified to speak across a wide range of perspectives on software preservation and is interested in helping with the coordination of SPN due to its being the most prominent network of its type.