Good morning and happy Monday, @us-hosted users and @eaasi-alliance members!
This is your friendly reminder that our next EaaSI Network call is tomorrow, Tuesday (December 6th) at 4pm ET / 3pm CT / 1pm PT! Zoom details, calendar invite, and running notes for the call can be found pinned here:
EaaSI Network Community Call Info
This is going to be an update/info-heavy session from the team, as we want to be as transparent as possible and share where we’re at with service planning, development, and Phase 3 grant goals in the immediate wake of Seth’s departure as Program Manager in early November. I’ll include a summary below in our usual team update but imagine folks will have a lot of questions and definitely want to leave space here at the end of the year to hear any questions and concerns.
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Staffing changes
- In mid-October, Claire Fox moved from EaaSI’s Metadata Analyst to a position as Digital Preservation Librarian in Digital Preservation Services at Yale, where she will assist with implementation of emulation and EaaSI-related services for Yale collections. So while she is technically no longer “EaaSI staff”, she is still very much part of the EaaSI Network as one of Yale’s key stakeholders and representatives!
- As mentioned/linked above, Seth stepped down as Program Manager in early November. The position remains vacant and hiring a replacement is the Strategic Planning group’s #1 priority - we are currently waiting on the necessary approvals from Yale’s Library Executive Council and HR to post the job and start searching for candidates.
- Yale Library is in the middle of a hiring blitz which has stretched HR capacity, but we are hopeful the job will be posted in the coming weeks, by the end of the year, with a hiring committee convened and interviews taking place at some point in January.
- We will notify the EaaSI community when the job is posted and appreciate any and all signal-boosting or sharing with folks you feel would make an excellent EaaSI Program Manager!
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Development updates
- A variety of personal concerns slowed development work in October and November, but progress was made particularly on rewriting the Development Roadmap and advancing a critical infrastructural update on Yale’s EaaSI Network node.
- Critical dev work continued on our priotities for the next tagged EaaSI release, including:
- adding an “Advanced Emulation Project” interface for importing existing virtual machine disks and dynamic object-to-emulated-drive assignment
- back-end implementation of ACL (Access Control Lists) necessary for improved front-end permissions and sharing workflows
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Service planning
- Before he left, Seth drafted and submitted a business proposal to Yale Library leadership for fiscal sponsorship and stability of the EaaSI program post-grant-funding. The ball is largely in the court of Library administration to respond to the draft proposal.
- Euan is prepared to continue meeting with Library leadership to address any concerns in the proposal, make revisions, and generally keep moving the ball forward until the Program Manager position is filled.
- As always, we will share details with the EaaSI Network as soon as we can.
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iPres papers
- iPres 2022 proceedings are now available, featuring a key, citeable overview of the EaaSI program of work, along with several other contributions from key EaaSI team members:
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Investigating EaaSI as platform for hosting/preserving web-based publications
- The added capacity via Claire’s hire for local engagement at Yale has led almost immediately to conversations with the reorganized Beinecke’s Director of Digital Special Collections and Access regarding the use of EaaSI to maintain public access to a number of legacy Yale web publications.
- Building on previous conversations with EaaSI Network reps and friends from Stanford University Press, NYU, Portico, etc., the EaaSI team is using these Yale use cases to build toward generic, shareable workflows and recommendations for using EaaSI to emulate and provide ongoing access to web server-based applications and data.
- This will definitely be the topic of an EaaSI Network call in 2023!