Return to [[NDSA:Standards and Best Practices Working Group#Meeting Schedules, Minutes and Agendas | Meeting Schedules, Minutes and Agendas]]

== Notes ==
The primary thrust of this meeting was to hear presentations about, and encourage discussion on, digital and software-based artworks. Many of the speakers provided slide presentations (see Files), and all speakers addressed specific topics and the challenges they face in working with this material.

===Mickey Casad, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art===

[http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/ The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art] is a research collection at Cornell University, which includes a lot of different media formats. The collection is very broad corpus of complex multimedia objects dating from 1990s to present. There is a high level of difficulty in providing access and managing this collection. They received an NEH research and development grant to explore new strategies, and a significant deliverable for the grant is to document their work. They are focusing on scaleable workflows and practices to providing perpetual access. Their challenges include both technical and non-technical issues. They conducted a survey, and have identified a need to work with artists early on in the life cycle of digital content creation.

===Dianne Dietrich, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art===

There are three main technical issues they are currently dealing with:
#Developing a workflow for pulling files off media, which requires different tools and set-ups to get the work done.
#Investigating emulation to explore its potential as an option for baseline access.
#Documenting file-level metadata.

===Erica Titkemeyer, Smithsonian Digital Asset Management of Time-Based Media Art (TMBA)===

As part of the National Digital Stewardship Residency Program, Erica took on a project to look at video art within the Smithsonian's digital Asset management system (DAMS). Born-digital art is very complex, and involves a lot of components working together to recreate the museum experience. Obsolescence is one of the biggest issues, and the Smithsonian is developing digital preservation strategies.

===Crystal Sanchez, Smithsonian Digital Asset Management of Time-Based Media Art (TMBA)===

The DAMS team is working across the entire Smithsonian Institution with all units to talk to them about using the system. This is a diverse set of communities that run themselves as silos under the umbrella of the Smithsonian. All units have unique needs. The [http://www.si.edu/tbma/about Time-Based Media Art] (TMBA) is a a pan-institutional group, which has been discussing components of the various artworks with curators. Documentation of the working group's activities are available from their webpage.

===Isabel Meyer, Smithsonian Digital Asset Management of Time-Based Media Art (TMBA)===

The DAMS runs in an [http://www.opentext.com/what-we-do/industries/media-and-entertainment OpenText Media Management 7.1] environment. The system has some flexibility for each unit to customize. There are several components, and many options for metadata models. None of the out-of-the-box models really worked for digital media, so they're using the one for video for now. Users can link assets to each other and set up relationships between them. There is currently 422TB of content, and the DAMS has been through two migrations. The team takes routine snapshots of the entire repository, and is constantly checking for errors.

===Ben Fino-Radin, Digital Repository Manager, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)===

MoMA is focused on the conservation of software-based materials, not necessarily digital works of art. Many pieces are collected as design-based objects. They currently have 30 objects at the moment, and are also collecting video games, e.g., Tetris. The team is documenting source code, and collaborating with New York University computer science department to document executables. They are concerned with how to get something to run, and display it. They are using a repository to describe and inventory works, and thinking of ways to build a story around each piece. This work is used to help curators and conservators understand the history of a piece.

===Kate Lewis, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)===

These works are very complex, and museums have really only began to grapple with these issues in the last five years.

===Martina Haidvogl and Mark Hellar, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)===

SFMOMA prefers the term software-based art. In 2008, sfmoma collected two web-based works, and in 2009 they began to develop a long-term preservation strategy. Software-based art is different from video because video is a finished product. They host [http://agentruby.sfmoma.org/ Agent Ruby's Edream Portal], which has been moved to a virtual platform. This involves using virtualization as a preservation strategy for web-based art.
<br/><br/>
* Next call: June 16 at 1:00 p.m. ET
<br/>

==Files==

[[File:MoMA_NDSA.pdf‎]]

[[File:SFMOMA_NDSA.pdf]]

[[File:SI_TBMA_NDSA.pdf]]

NDSA:SI TBMA NDSA.pdf

2014-06-05T17:40:08Z

Kate Murry:

NDSA:SFMOMA NDSA.pdf

2014-06-05T17:39:56Z

Kate Murry:

NDSA:May 19, 2014 Standards and Practices Working Group Notes

2014-06-05T17:39:18Z

Kate Murry: /* Files */

2014-03-11T17:04:58Z

Kate Murry:

Return to the [[NDSA:Standards and Best Practices Working Group#Current Scope of Work | Current Scope of Work]]

==March 10, 2014==

'''Roster'''

*Kate Murray, LC
*Barrie Howard, LC
*John Spencer, BMS/Chase
*Heather Heckman, USC
*Linda Tadic, AMPAS
*Carl Fleischhauer, LC
*Kara Van Malssen, AVPreserve
*Karen Cariani, WGBH
*Andrea Goethals, Harvard
*Winston Atkins, Duke
*Paula De Stefano, NYU
*Melitte Buchman, NYU
*Jesse Johnston, NEH
*Josh Sternfeld, NEH

'''Discussion'''

Kate Murray provided some background for this exploration: the Standards WG realized a lot of people are working on issues related to born-digital video (BDV). On the [[NDSA:Digital video exploration meeting notes#February 7, 2014 | first call]] the participants discovered a need to capture a list questions because there are so many directions to take the exploration. The questions are listed [[NDSA:Digital video exploration | here]].

The scope of today's call is to review the questions, and organize or prioritize the list. The group should also consider choosing one or two specific questions to explore in depth, or aggregating sub-sets of questions under categories or themes that would seed a general survey to send out to NDSA members. There was clarification that BDV is not limited by format, e.g., HD or SD, or both. This was addressed because NYU has experienced that digital-deposit video formats are very different from those used for analog migrations. NYU recommended adding a question to address the issue of creating digital masters, and how to educate creators about BDV workflow.

[http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/ FADGI] is looking at workflow issues with its work on MXF. There was consensus that training and workshops are important since they impact processing workflows down the road. The questions were reviewed as a group, with the following additions:
*What technical formats are you using for BDV?
*With regular depositers, how far back in the chain of creation do you go to address digital video formats?
* Since not everyone has direct control, or the opportunity to reach out to the artists to influence file creation, what practices are you using with ingest processing for born-digital video?
**Normalization
**Keeping the original files
**Monitoring
*What types of auxiliary files are you keeping along with the content, e.g., stills?
*How are you trying to model higher level objects, e.g., a single program spanning four tapes?

WGBH has discovered that the formats they receive is whatever is coming out of a camera. It's not a conscience choice of the creator. One way to manage what you can expect to receive is provide guidance on what kind of camera a creator should use based on the types of files they create.

As a next step, the group decided to:
#Group the questions under specific themes or topics, e.g., ingest, file formats, etc.
#Identify a survey model and tool, e.g., the storage survey started with a page on the wiki, and the working group first learned where they had consensus where they didn't. Then they created a more formal survey.
#Design a simple, one-question, multiple-choice survey, with three-five high-level themes for responders to identify as their top issues for dealing with BDV.
#Identify a process for disseminating the survey.
#Disseminate a survey to the full NDSA membership

Everyone in this group has some familiarity with BDV, but can we reach the non-experts, who are receiving more video into their workflow? There's a lot of video content out there people are dealing with, which is not part of their preservation programs. Can we just reach out to the NDSA membership via the NDSA-ALL email list? This is a good place to start because the NDSA has a wide range of practioners from novice to expert.

The group completed a preliminary exercise in grouping the questions into themes:
#Technical specifications around metadata, file formats, etc.
#Reformatting physical media
#Workflow, e.g., is your workflow different for access files versus preservation files?
#Storage - ready access vs. long-term preservation storage
#Tools
#Policies, e.g., collection development policies or preservation program priorities
#Rights issues, e.g., copyright, licensing, DRM

'''Action items'''
#Draft notes & upload to the wiki - Barrie Howard
#Group the questions under high-level themes - Andrea Goethals and Kate Murray
#Share survey model developed by AMPAS for [http://www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/digitaldilemma2/ The Digital Dilemma 2] - Linda Tadic (completed on 3/10/14 - Thanks Linda!)
#Set up another call on 3/31 - Kate Murray (complete)<br/><br/>

==February 7, 2014==

Thanks to all for participating in the digital video brainstorming session on Friday afternoon! We had a great introductory discussion involving NDSA members from The Library of Congress, Harvard, Stanford, NYU, Columbia, University of South Carolina, CalTech, Duke, WGBH, and UCLA/Audiovisual Archive Network. For many of institutions, video is the last big genre of content that isn’t (well) supported in current digital preservation repository and access systems. MOOCs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course), collaborative projects and mass digitization also are areas of special interest. We discussed how we might best collect and compare data – perhaps through case studies (generalized or specific), formal survey, etc. In the end, we decided that we need to better define the questions we wanted to explore.

Our primary action item was to set up a new page on the wiki in order to capture questions and topics related to video to help us narrow our scope. We will have another meeting in a few weeks to discuss how we might organize and address the selected topics in a thoughtful way. We will set up a Doodle poll for the next meeting.

All NDSA Standards members are welcome to submit questions/comments on digital video to the wiki page:

Direct link to page on wiki: http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Digital_video_exploration&osindsawikipdb_session=e242a4804ce795249cac084b5af027e9

You can also get to the page through the main wiki page: http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Standards_and_Best_Practices_Working_Group (scroll down to Digital Video Exploration)

NDSA:Digital video exploration

2014-03-10T17:49:12Z

Kate Murry:

Please feel free to list questions for the initial digital video survey below. For example:

* what are the technical specifications (formats, file characteristics, etc) you use? Especially for born digital video.
* Do you have guidelines for preferred/accepted digital video formats? Would you be able to share them?
* Are you doing video reformatting in-house, through out-sourcing or a combination? If you are outsourcing some of this how did you decide which to outsource?
* Do you contract for consultation services to support your video efforts?
* Are you storing any technical metadata for video and if so, in what form/schema?
* What are your biggest challenges related to video?
* Are you delivering the video you preserve, and if so using what tools/platforms/services?
* Do you index any technical metadata and if so, which fields? (Duke)
* Do you store your preservation master files in institutionally managed storage, through a commercial service, or both? (Duke)
* What analog-to-digital interface do you use (i.e., SAMMA, BlackMagic, Kona, AJA)? (Duke)
* What tools do you use in a preservation workflow?
* What compression engine do you use to create access derivatives (i.e., Front Porch, Nero MPEG-Streamclip, Apple Compressor)? (Duke--this question may cover some of the same ground as the "Are you delivering ..." question, above.)
* Do copyright issues influence your preservation priorities? If so, how?
* How are your video preservation activities funded?
* Are you better equipped and resourced for video preservation, for video access, or are they resourced and equipped equally?
* How far back in chain of creation do you go with regular depositors of BDV?
* what practices are you using with ingest processing for BDV - normalize, keep original files, etc.
* what types of auxiliary/associated materials files keep along with original files
* are you trying to model higher level objects (1 program over 4 tapes, for example)
* what is the big roadblock for preserving video? Why is it not part of the usual preservation environment?
* what about multiple versions, raw material and associated materials that come in on one disc or drive. What do you keep? How do you make the decision? Do you keep only the final version?