Dear Colleagues,

Registration is now open<http://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/spn-forum/registration-2/> for the Software Preservation Network (SPN) Forum! As you make your travel plans for the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Annual Meeting, don't miss this opportunity to participate in the emerging effort to establish a comprehensive software preservation strategy for cultural heritage institutions. Community participation will be key to a successful program.

There will be no registration fee, but space is limited!

The Forum will be held Monday, August 1st, 2016 on the Georgia State University Student Center<http://studentcenter.gsu.edu/> in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. Participants can expect a lively, engaging, and informative program that the SPN team hopes will build consensus around next steps for preserving software at scale - all in the larger effort to ensure long-term access to digital objects.

The Forum theme, "Action Research: Empowering the Cultural Heritage Community and Mapping Out Next Steps for Software Preservation" reflects the mission of the Software Preservation Network (SPN) to solicit community input. The SPN project team believes that the practice of critical reflection around software preservation must incorporate members from complementary domains to actively participate in a coordinated effort to develop a sustainable, national strategy for proprietary software licensing and collection - pulling heavily from the collective, lived experience and expertise of researcher-practitioners in software development, law, archives, libraries, museums, and other domains.

Important Dates:
April 5: Registration opens
April 18: Notification of proposal acceptance
May 31: Registration closes

More information about the forum and registration is available on the Software Preservation Network website<http://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/>. Don't wait, register today<http://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/spn-forum/registration-2/>!


Friendly Regards,

Jessica Meyerson, <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>, Digital Archivist, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin
Zach Vowell, <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>, Digital Archivist, Robert E. Kennedy Library, California Polytechnic State University