NDSA:Tuesday, Aug 27, 2013

Next Call: Sep 17th, 2:00 PM Eastern, Cal Lee present/discuss the Bitcurator project On the Call:

• Emily Shaw, U of Iowa
• Karen Cariani, WGBH
• Trevor Owens, Library of Congress
• Dave McCarran, WGBH
• Joe Pawletko, NYU
• Michael Levy, Holocaust Museum
• Cal Lee, UNC
• Michelle, Library of Congress
• Michelle Paolillo, Cornell
• Carol Kussman, Minnesota Historical Society

National Agenda for Digital Stewardship

If you haven’t given it a read, take a few minutes to skim it. In particular, these are the four areas identified for work in infrastructure. http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa/documents/2014NationalAgenda.pdf

• File Format Action Plan Development
• Interoperability and Portability in Storage Architectures
• Integration of Digital Forensics Tools
• Ensuring Content Integrity

If you have any ideas for small things we could do as a group to contribute to these areas, please feel free to pitch your idea to the list or bring it to the next call.

NDSA levels Ad-Hoc group:

The NDSA levels cross-working group team has a few next stages to their work. They are working on one explores and documents uses for the NDSA levels and the other focus on working up short sets of guidance and information for meeting the requirements of each box in the chart. There was also a question as to if this group should be made into a defacto working group or if it should persist as a cross working group team. This is likely best passed off to the coordinating committee to think through. There was also interest in a potential new project to think about how to test/validate the ideas in the levels.

http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Levels_of_preservation

Next steps on Open Source Project:

Karen and Joe volunteered to take a look at the four open source software project interviews we have done so far (listed below) and think about useful ways to build on this work. It might be about synthesizing something that cuts across them? Or summarizing some of the similarities and differences in the approaches? Or just talking through what each identify as the unique contributions of open source to digital preservation.

• Hydra’s Open Source Approach: An Interview with Tom Cramer http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2013/05/hydras-open-source-approach-an-interview-with-tom-cramer/
• Islandora’s Open Source Ecosystem and Digital Preservation: An Interview with Mark Leggott http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2013/03/islandoras-open-source-ecosystem-and-digital-preservation-an-interview-with-mark-leggott/
• Archivematica and the Open Source Mindset for Digital Preservation Systems http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/10/archivematica-and-the-open-source-mindset-for-digital-preservation-systems/
• Open Source Software and Digital Preservation: An Interview with Bram van der Werf of the Open Planets Foundation http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/04/open-source-software-and-digital-preservation-an-interview-with-bram-van-der-werf-of-the-open-planets-foundation/

Fixity Check Chart: Fixity in Practice:

There was considerable interest in thinking about fixity in practice or fixity check chart project. In discussion, it sounds like there are two distinct but related activities in here that we need to sort out. Most of the participants on the call were interested in either or both of these issues.

1. Getting started with fixity practices. This could, for example, work through the each of the 4 fixity levels in the NDSA levels of digital preservation. The goal here would be to work through how to get started, different kinds of approaches and tools you can use to establish your workflows.
2. Fixity trade offs decision tool. Given different systems, different kinds of content, different scales of content etc. there should be different approaches to the frequency of fixity checking. There is interest in developing some kind of grid, or decision tree that could help orgs decide the best approach to how frequently to check the fixity of their content.