NDSA:October 24, 2012 Standards Working Group Notes

WebEx meeting notes, October 24, 2012

Attending: Jimi Jones, Andrea Goethals(note taker), Meg Philips, Carol Kussman, Kate Murray, Stephen Davis, Dina Sokolova, Midge Coates, Karen Cariani, Linda Tadic, Kelcy Shepherd, Winston Atkins. (Apologies if I have left anyone out, please feel free to add your name.)

The WebEx recording can be found here: TBD

Opening

2 new members introduced themselves:

• Kelcy Shepherd, Five Colleges, Inc. / University of Massachusetts Amherst
• Winston Atkins, Duke University Libraries

Jimi reminded us that it this was his last meeting as co-chair and that Kate Zwaard from the Library of Congress would be the next co-chair starting next month. Jimi will continue to participate in the NDSA in the Content Working Group and will attend the Partners meetings.

Staffing Survey

Recognition of Kate's great work on the poster. Follow up:

• possible article in David Anderson's (Univ. of Portsmouth) new journal
• Christoph Becker is conducting the same survey for a UN members workshop which will primarily have European participants.
• Produce a full report of the results (will aim to produce this by next March). Meg, Andrea (and Carol after the call) volunteered to work on this report.
• Linda will report back on the results of talking about this on an upcoming panel.
• a PDF of the poster was put on the public Standards & Practices WG web page. If anyone would like the poster in a different format/version contact Kate.
• we will want to archive and preserve the survey data, possibly in the ICPSR data repository. Stephen suggested also we preserve the poster. Winston volunteered to work on this with someone else.
• repeat this in a few years (but making changes based on lessons learned from this iteration)
• those who took the survey, and those who worked on it, should jot down what we would want to change fairly soon while it's fresh in our minds

iPRES Conference

• Andrea will send around to the group her conference highlights
• Stephen found the difference between the large web archiving projects and Columbia's experience striking
• Meg found interesting the dynamic between the pure researchers and practitioners, in particular the TIMBUS project brought this to light
• Several liked Andy Jackson's format study. Stephen said this calls into question what exactly obsolescence means.

Wiki Project

• Andrea discussed at a Coordinating Committee call the possibility that we might want help from others in advancing this project to the stage where we could begin publicizing it. (This was based on concern that Columbia is currently shouldering most of the work of this project and we don't want to take advantage of their good will).
• Stephen suggested that they continue to work on the revamping of the digital preservation article until December when we can take a vision check-in. He thinks we should wait to publicize it broader until the new article structure is in place. They will throw up a flare when they need help with particular things. They are OK for now on finding sources to cite. They would like the group's help reviewing the work as they complete it. One thing we will need to consider at some point is how much we want to try to keep to our outlined strategy and how much we are willing to let others morph it independently of our project.

Closing

• No new project ideas yet.
• Stephen mentioned the Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust) and DPN, both of which Columbia is involved in.
  • (After the call we found out that APTrust is "committed to the creation and management of a preservation repository that will aggregate academic and research content from many institutions" and has a web site at [1]
• There was some discussion of TDRs and assessments. NARA is starting a self-assessment.
• In the Innovation WG people are giving reports on what's going on in their institutions. Maybe we could do something similar related to certifications or assessments.
• The Earth Science institute at Columbia has been doing (or did?) a self-certification for ISO x and it didn't go very well.
• We all said bye to Jimi and wished him luck at Hampshire College.