Learn about current SPN-wide efforts—activities that crosscut working groups and affiliated projects.
Saving Software, Together: Software Preservation Network (SPN) Welcomes New Members for 2021 and Beyond
After a successful two-year seed funded period, the Software Preservation Network is now welcoming new members for the year 2021 and beyond. By investing $5,000 per year, your organization will join a vibrant community of practice committed to ensuring long-term access to software through community engagement, infrastructure support, and knowledge generation.
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.
The SPN Return on Investment: What are our members saying?
"Membership in the SPN community is valuable to Duke because it has allowed us to engage in numerous community activities, stay informed of software preservation practices and projects, and contribute to SPN's strategic goals." -Sophia Lafferty-Hess, Duke University
"The University of Arizona Libraries has found tremendous value in SPN membership via the Fostering Communities of Practice project where we connected the Network's expertise with the work of local software preservation practitioners and the Libraries' Digital Preservation Lab. Our Lab has also benefited from SPN through access to the EaaSI platform, which is helping us explore software-specific digital preservation workflows."
-Sarah Shreeves, University of Arizona
Today we are very excited to share details about the SPN Exclusive Hosted Emulation Services Pilot that we’ll be offering as an opt-in benefit for all members that renew or join SPN for 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
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 SPN by October 30, 2020 to participate in the SPN Exclusive EaaSI Hosted Emulation Services pilot in 2021. The October 30th deadline is set by the SPN/EaaSI Pilot Staff in order to ensure that we have time in November to confirm participating pilot nodes, set up user accounts for participants from each pilot node, survey (BRIEF) pilot nodes and poll for availability for a pilot kick-off call at the end of January 2021. Our goal is to have all the pilot nodes set up and ready to launch when folks return to work in the New Year.
RBG and Oracle; Sovereign Immunity Study; SPN joins CASE Act Letter; DMCA Marches On
The legal world was shaken by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September, and the extraordinary speed with which President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell intend to replace her. The new nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, doesn’t have a clear track record on copyright or technology policy, but Justice Ginsburg certainly did. RBG was a reliable vote for copyright holders, and often wrote for the majority in big copyright cases where rightsholders prevailed, including the famous term extension case, Eldred v. Ashcroft. Ginsburg’s absence from the Court may give an advantage to Google (or remove an advantage for Oracle) in the Court’s consideration of the Oracle v. Google case. Oral arguments in that case are scheduled for October 7. (Like all of the arguments in the COVID era, they will take place by teleconference and audio will be broadcast to the public by various media outlets.) SPN filed an amicus brief in the case, urging the court to avoid disturbing the stable body of fair use law that has become essential to research, teaching, and preservation.
In mid-September the Copyright Office published the first round of comments in its study of infringement by state institutions. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) requested this report after the Supreme Court’s decision in Allen v. Cooper, another case where SPN joined an amicus brief, this time on the question of whether states (and state institutions) are immune from certain remedies in copyright suits. The Court’s opinion said that while states are currently immune, if evidence of extensive, intentional infringement were found, then Congress could abrogate immunity. The Copyright Office’s study is meant to determine whether there is evidence of state infringement sufficient to support congressional action. Comments in the first round were underwhelming, and did not seem to meet the threshold the Court announced in Cooper.
Senator Lindsay Graham introduced a bill in the Senate in late September that included provisions known as the CASE Act, a proposal that would create a new quasi-court housed in the Copyright Office and enable rightsholders to pursue infringement claims in a streamlined process designed to make it easier for plaintiffs to bring such claims. SPN joined a coalition letter addressed to the Senate Judiciary Committee cautioning that the CASE Act creates unnecessary new risk for libraries, technology companies, and creators who could be harassed by copyright plaintiffs with dubious claims. The quasi-court the bill creates also has serious constitutional deficiencies. The bill is scheduled for markup in the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 1.
The DMCA rulemaking marches on. A new team of students at the Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic has commenced work on SPN’s argument for an expanded exemption, with the goal of enabling remote access to preserved software. If you have experiences to share—especially stories that show how lawful remote access to software could be valuable for research—please fill out this form ASAP. Clinic student attorneys will use information in the form to help develop evidence for the rulemaking.
Upcoming Quarterly Community Forum Scheduled for Dec. 1
The Software Preservation Network invites you to join us for the upcoming Quarterly Software Curation and Preservation Community Forum taking place on Tuesday, December 1 at 9 am PT/11 am CT/12 pm ET. Each quarter, we invite our colleagues across professional and disciplinary communities to participate in an hour-long discussion on topics related to software curation, preservation, and reuse. The Quarterly Community Forum is free and open to all (you do not have to be a SPN member to attend or participate).
As a subscriber to to the Software Preservation Network listserv, you will receive reminders, calendar invites, and call-in information for the QCF via email.
