View source for NDSA:January 17, 2012 Standards Working Group Notes

NDSA Standards Working Group

January 17, 2012

WebEx Meeting Notes


WebEx recording is here: TBD


In attendance (Please add your name if I’ve left it out.):
* Jimi Jones (co-chair)
* Andrea Goethals (co-chair)
* Amy Kirchhoff
* Barbara Dean
* Emily F. Shaw
* Jess Branco Colati
* Karen Cariani
* Kate Murray
* Linda Tadic
* Meg Phillips
* Stephen Davis
* Sue DuBois


'''Intro'''
The new members on the call introduced themselves: Barbara Dean and Emily Shaw.


'''What do we want to get out of the group'''
We started with a discussion of what people want to get out of participating in the group. Stephen thought that the Wikipedia project and survey should remain part of our agenda. He thought that we shouldn't take too much on until the projects we started are moving along. Barbara felt that the WG is a good fit for her and her organization. Karen (who co-chairs the Infrastructure WG) participates to see how we can work with the Infrastructure WG and to make sure we're not stepping on each others toes. Meg has been very pleased that we were able to start up and make progress on the staffing survey project despite also working on the Wikipedia project. Amy wants to stay abreast of what's happening in the standards space. In response a few of us, including Amy, said that we should start forwarding new standards information to the mailing list. Karen thinks that we have been taking on work that is manageable. Someone asked if the Coordinating Committee expects particular things from our WG. Jimi said that this is an experimental venture powered by volunteers, so what we do is driven by us.


'''Wikipedia Project'''
Andrea gave an update on the WikiProject portion of the Wikipedia project. She showed how the statistics are now working. She asked for opinions on which graphic to use for the project. Several people opted for the binary clock image. Someone asked about the scope. Andrea thought we should at least include the things that are directly linkable from the digital preservation article but that more secondary content will likely be driven by the expertise of the participants (for example we have a lot of audio expertise in the group).

Stephen gave an update on the Wikipedia article restructuring. He has been aggregating authoritative sources to cite in the article. He has also been talking to Priscilla Caplan who has agreed to help with the article rewrite. She is planning to write a book about digital preservation so this work could complement that. Stephen has been drafting the article on the NDSA wiki but it's wiki software isn't completely compatible with Wikipedia's. We decided that the best way to write it may be in a Word Document and then transfer it to the Wikipedia Sandbox as we get closer to publishing it on the Wikipedia site. (The Wikipedia Sandbox gets wiped periodically).


'''Staffing Survey'''
Meg explained the context of the staffing survey. We discussed some new questions for the survey which Jimi will add to the staffing survey planning page on the wiki. 

Stephen mentioned the ARL spec kit which had similar questions. He saved a copy of Columbia's responses so he'll share that with us. 

Someone asked if there were lessons we could learn from the Infrastructure WG's survey. Karen said that Trevor, Micah and Andrea largely shaped that one. Karen said that we could answer it on 2 passes like the Infra. WG did so that we could learn from the first one and refine it. Andrea said that we should try to make the questions quantifiable but that we may need to leave a few open-ended. 

Stephen had an idea of developing institutional profiles in part because the information we ask on these surveys will change over time. Institutions could update their profiles. We should keep this in mind for a future project.

Jimi suggested that we all add any questions we'd like answered to the planning page and then we'll work to winnow it down and rewrite them later. We'll also add use cases (how the survey responses will be used) to the page which will help us come up with the final questions. 

Next call we will try to make it an hour and 15 minutes since we keep running out of time.