Since 2016, SPN has united colleagues from design firms, history of computing museums, research data repositories, university libraries, art museums, and the open source software community around critical questions and collaborative solutions to software preservation challenges. In January 2019, SPN launched a two-year seed funded effort to secure SPN as a sustainable, community-owned organization. Over the last two years, SPN has successfully cultivated a healthy community of practice focused on building field-level capacity for long-term access and reuse of software. SPN members design and complete research into evolving practice, affiliated projects and working groups identify common needs that allow SPN member organizations to make strategic digital curation decisions, and the nimble SPN staff provides the training and coordination necessary to distribute software preservation skills across a broader set of individuals.

As we look to the future, we recognize that the COVID-19 pandemic is presenting unprecedented challenges to organizations and individuals across the information stewardship landscape. The pandemic is also highlighting the critical role that member communities play in organizational resilience and continuing support of the research enterprise.

By investing in SPN, your organization will join a network of software preservation professionals that are distributing the risk and lowering the actual cost of the work for any one organization, while simultaneously sharing ownership over the strategic direction of the field and the use of collective resources.

Hosted Emulation Services for SPN Members

Are you curious about what “hosted emulation services” might look like? Do you want to know how software configuration and emulation might fit into your existing workflows? Are you interested in having a structured series of conversations with a cohort of peer organizations that are looking to develop and share workflows, policies, and software?

If you said YES to any of the questions above, join us by October 30, 2020 to participate in the SPN Exclusive EaaSI Hosted Emulation Services pilot in 2021.

The Hosted Emulation Services Pilot Summary provides all the information an organization might need to determine if they would like to participate as a pilot node, including:

• Goals of the pilot

• Defining EaaSI and EaaSI features

• Roles of staff and pilot nodes

• Benefits of participating in the pilot

• Pilot services provided by EaaSI

• Expectations of participating pilot nodes including activities and time commitment

• Timeline of key phases and activities to take place over the course of the pilot period

• Pilot measures, data collection, and documentation – this section describes what data we plan to collect, how we plan to collect it, and data retention during and after the pilot

For more information on the Software Preservation Network, check out our membership flyer, visit our Get Involved Page, or reach out to SPN’s community facilitator, Jess Farrell, at <jess.farrell@educopia.org>.