NDSA:Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Infrastructure Working Group Call, March 27, 2012, 2pm-3pm

Attending

• Andrea Goethels, Harvard University
• Dean Farrell, UNC
• Jefferson Bailey, Library of Congress
• John Spenser, BMS Chase
• Mark Evans, Tessalla
• Micah Altman, MIT
• Trevor Owens, Library of Congress
• Corey Snavely, University of Michigan
• Aaron Trehub, Auburn University
• Karen Cariani, WGBH
• Joe Pawletko, NYU
• Linda Tadic, Audiovisual Archive Network
• Rebecca L. Wendt, California State Archives

Action Items

1. Andrea and Trevor volunteered to reach out to Standards and Infrastructure group members about continuing work on the of Preservation document. Anyone else interested should contact them to participate
2. Micah and Mark shared Managing Bit Level Preservation Risks an open document which we can discuss on the list and comment on.
3. Karen, Micah, and Andrea are planning a session on the level preservation risks topic for the NDSA NDIIPP meeting this summer. Contact one of them if you would like to participate.
4. Trevor reported out about the Preservation Stack Exchange Q&A site proposal. Everyone should take a moment to follow it and vote it up. Expect an email from Trevor in the next week or two that everyone should consider customizing and sharing with the various groups and lists we are on with some interest in digital preservation.
5. The Open Source project is being further defined, scoped and refined. Contact Trevor or Karen if you would like to be involved in the action team.
6. Everyone is invited to suggest and brainstorm future projects. Feel free to post new ideas to the page.

Discussion Notes

1. Report out on the joint leadership meeting: We briefly discussed some of the ideas that came out of the joint leadership meeting. The joint leadership meeting notes and documentation is live on the NDSA Wiki. Of particular relevance to infrastructure was the Innovation group taking the idea of the digital preservation forums and turning it into the stack exchange proposal idea, and the continued interest in further developing the levels of preservation documentation that the outreach group was putting together via a cross working group action team.

2. Discussions on the list discussion: Managing Bit Level Preservation Risks This month our list conversation didn't really happen. Mark and Micah had intended to kick off a conversation about issues related to tradeoffs in decisions about how many copies to keep. Their discussion is now part of an open Google doc that group members can edit, Assessing and Mitigating Bit-Level Preservation Risks: A Review. Feel free to add to the document or to start up discussion on parts of the document on the discussion list. Micah, Andrea, and Karen are planning on putting together a session on this issue for the working. This would likely be a valuable topic to bring to the LC storage meeting this September too.

3. Report out on ongoing discussion of the open source project. The OSS project action team had updated the wiki page for the project with a new way of framing the project that we can consider http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Open_Source_Software#Key_Issues_to_Consider_in_Evaluation_of_Open_Source_Platforms_for_Digital_Stewardship

Here is the text defining the project we have worked up:

The group is exploring key issues and points of consideration in use and practices for using or developing open source software for key components in digital preservation software systems and workflows.

The goal of this project would be to synthesize some of the general work that exists on factors to consider on open source software (ex. modularity, indicators of active community, etc). See some of the references at the bottom of this page for examples of some of that work. We would then contextualize these considerations in relation to particular issues that emerge when planning for long term access to digital objects.) For example, serious consideration about what kind of imprint any tool has on the objects one is preserving. This could also include some considerations about some of the particular values that open source offers for thinking about long term access. The work product would be a brief guidance document, or short paper outlining these considerations.

Feel free to comment on that page, or to contact Trevor if you would be interested in participating in this subgroup. The next step here is likely to break this into a action plan for how to get this project to execute this project, Arron Treehub is interested in being involved.

4. Discussion of innovation group Stack Exchange Q&A site proposal: The innovation group has kicked off a proposal for a digital preservation Q&A site on stack exchange. There is a lot of

5. Open conversation about next project ideas: Members are encouraged to add any new ideas for projects to the ideascale page.This is an open place for us to keep generating ideas so if you have a thought for something that you think would be useful go ahead and add it. http://ndsa.ideascale.com/a/ideafactory.do?id=4760&mode=recent&discussionFilter=byids&discussionID=11334