NDSA:Plan for 2012

This message was sent to the NDSA CWG listserv January 19, 2012. We encourage all members to read and provide feedback on the list and in future meetings and discussions.

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We are now 70 members strong, and your co-chairs have been discussing ways of regrouping to engage more members in the work in 2012. We've come up with this plan, which we wanted to share and discuss with you on this list and on our next call. We hope that you'll offer up your thoughts and suggestions as we move ahead in the new year.

The Registry work has some momentum right now, and while that's moving ahead, we'd like to also regroup ourselves around some smaller tasks that will help us accomplish our Clearinghouse goals. Then eventually bring these two efforts together in some way to present a unified view of our groups work. Kristine Hanna has offered to continue her leadership role moving ahead with these next steps along with your co-chairs, and we thank her for that!

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Step 1. Draft a few simple questions that will serve as a checklist for determining what might be at-risk. We need a few volunteers to help us with this effort; please contact Abbie or Cathy asap if you have some time to help get started with this before our Feb 1 meeting.

Step 2. Break into smaller content teams. How we group ourselves is open to suggestion, but here's a starter list for discussion on the list. These are based on NDIIPP content categories - should we group some of these so we have less teams? Have others? Are there things not covered?

• Government (seeds of this already with the local gov group)
• Politics and Law
• Maps and Geography
• News, Media, and Journalism
• Science
• Mathematics and Technology
• Social Sciences
• World History and Cultures
• American History
• Arts and Culture
• Religion and Philosophy

Ideally everyone in the content WG will sign up for at least one that fits their organizations content area of interest. We will need a leader identified for each "team." We ask that the teams then organize themselves with meetings and communications (rather than Kristine, Cathy and Abbie organizing your work).

Step 3. Content Teams will take the initial checklist and:

  1) find examples in their content areas based on the checklist questions
  2) determine if additional questions should be asked given the specific content area
  3) report back to the larger group at our monthly calls once done with initial tasks (we'll figure out details later for when/who/what)

Step 4. Based on the work of the groups, determine what input form might be for submitting at-risk content. [plan to form a small team around this activity]

Step 5 [or maybe this is as the other work is going on? in parallel?]. Discussion of tools integration. Determing how to integrate the "things that are at--risk" work with the "things that are preserved" work. We would want a group to investigate ways that we could build on the registry spreadsheet/input form and maybe have a second componant of it that is the clearinghouse. We can brainstorm more later, but we think it is key to link these activities to raise more awareness about both aspects of our work.

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So, some questions for you today:

• What comments or questions do you have about this plan?

• What are the Content Teams should we form?

• What level of granularity should our "at-risk" nominations be in? We'll discuss this at our Feb. call but this could be collection level, or a more granular "object" level. Can one website or media file or dataset be identified as at-risk? Something to think about as we progress.

Please respond via the list with any thoughts you have...

Best, Abbie and Cathy, your co-chairs

further notes

Notes from CWG call 1/20/2012

Abbie Grotke, Cathy Hartman, Abby Rumsey met to brainstorm about the questions we could use to determine risk.

Instead of thinking solely about whether content is at-risk, Abby suggested we think more about value.

At risk of disappearance is no the only thing. What is of long-term value is also important, as is what can be reused. What is the benefit to use again?

• How is the content of value?
• Who is it of value to?
• Who would be interested in preserving it?

While each institution defines value for itself, there is some benefit in working together to talk about the value and risk of broad categories of content.

Abby suggested we reread the Blue Ribbon Task Force report [ http://brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/BRTF_Final_Report.pdf] executive summary (p1) and also the sections on the four content domains and recommendations for stakeholders to take action – how archives can be there before (to help them create archival content) and when donors are ready to hand-off content in need of preservation.

We discussed whether the clearinghouse is too passive of an idea. We realize what we really need is an awareness-raising tool, something to use in PR.

Instead of the risk exercise we had outlined, maybe a better approach is to have our Content teams decide categories of content that are important in their groups (ie. Blogs of NGOs, legal blogs, citizen science sites, local newspaper websites, etc.). Develop cases studies/models that could be shared broadly to get others thinking about the topic. Show why things are at risk. Encourage the cultivation of relationships. Content team members could share experiences they’ve had, document successes and failure in negotiating such relationships around content they know and care about.

Come up with case study that defines:

• Rationale for collecting – why is this at risk, what value does the content have?
• Pitch to donors – how did you or do you plan to build your approach?
• Barriers for users/creators – what challenges did you/might you face?
• Actionable items – what can we do next, as a community (or individual institution)?

Cathy discussed recent experiences at UNT with local news organizations that might be useful to share with the CWG as an example. Would be helpful to provide a roadmap – we did this, then this, then contact this type of person, this worked, this didn’t.

Cathy will try to get someone at UNT who has been working on this to write something up for us.