Dear CollectionSpace Community, The CollectionSpace Leadership Working Group held our 4th quarterly meeting for FY2016-17 on May 25th, 2017. Following that meeting, I wanted to share our regular update with the membership. The working group members discussed a variety of topics including: Outreach Efforts * I am very happy to report that the CollectionSpace program continues to grow. As of the beginning of February, there are 15 members across the six membership levels, close to thirty implementations, and four active Registered Service Providers. o Not a member yet? Reach out to Megan Forbes at megan.forbes@lyrasis.org<mailto:megan.forbes@lyrasis.org> or Ann Whiteside at awhiteside@gsd.harvard.edu<mailto:awhiteside@gsd.harvard.edu> to get started! * Leadership working group members have each taken on specific outreach assignments to reach out to potential members in their region and/or domain. A list of upcoming conferences where LWG members will be speaking or attending is available on the community calendar: http://www.collectionspace.org/calendars/<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.collectionspace.org_calendars_&d=CwMFAg&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=FRClhsB8MoZpzpjl618daRLwTDHzTj-thPNaw2gAkDA&m=gjDv-Vhrz5rwh8QA6xpub_vJMTBW0ZQibTFFIwgFs58&s=8kOIYpdMtrcs1Z_ElllmWKbXzxuBwjwdaa95m7PmshU&e=>. It includes a busy booth at the American Alliance of Museums conference in St Louis and Megan is looking forward to talking to members and potential members at the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections in Denver in June. * We were pleased to review a strong slate of nominees for the Leadership and Functional Working Groups. Elections for the open positions will be conducted in June. So look for an email inviting the member representative at your institution to vote! Partnerships * As part of our outreach to the academic community, the CollectionSpace program team submitted a grant application to the Kress Foundation in March which, if successful, would pilot "CollectionSpace for Education" at four museum studies programs. In addition to creating three teaching modules around CollectionSpace and open-source software, the program has the potential to spread awareness of CollectionSpace and open source software among new museum studies graduates, and to gain a toehold for CollectionSpace in the 200+ universities with museum studies programs. * The Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Rhode Island School of Design, partners in development of a new profile and consortium designed to improve management of design materials collections, continued their outreach through the spring, attending four conferences and providing CollectionSpace demos to several organizations. The consortium expects to add several new members by the end of summer. * There has been a recent swell of interest from various foundations exploring how CollectionSpace may assist with inventory and management of the collections of working artists. We're excited by this new use case, and will be working with the foundations on potential future collaborations. * The Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF) has begun work on a profile to support public art collections, and the program team is looking forward to contributing to their efforts. Mini Grant Program * The group reviewed our mini grant program and agreed to focus remaining funding on implementations that expand our existing communities in fine and contemporary art, anthropology, botanical gardens, herbaria, design materials, bonsai, or local history and material culture and applicants that will make a long-term commitment to the application. This program has ended for this fiscal year but will begin accepting new applications in the new fiscal year. Operational updates * We were pleased to hear technical development is on track. * Release v4.5 is anticipated in June and will include two new profiles supporting Anthropology and Botanical Gardens. * With our highly anticipated June release of 5.0 release, the architecture and APIs will be sufficiently documented so that developers from the community at large will be able to contribute bug fixes and new features to the code base. It will also result in a faster, cleaner and more modernized interface. The working group extends its thanks to all of you for your continuing support and ongoing contributions to the great community we are building. Respectfully, Ann Whiteside +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Ann Whiteside Librarian/Assistant Dean for Information Services Frances Loeb Library Harvard University Graduate School of Design https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/frances-loeb-library/ http://www.sah.org/publications-and-research/sahara