NDSA:March 18, 2013 Standards Working Group Notes

Monday (3/18/13) at 1 p.m. EDT (GMT -04:00)

Attendees: Emily Shaw, Andrea Goethals, Butch Lazorchak, Carl Fleischhauer, Carol Kussman, Dinal Sokolova, John Spencer, Karen Cariani, Kate Murray, Midge Coates, Sheila Morrissey, Winston Atkins, Amy Kirchhoff

1. New member introduction: None
2. New projects:
   • Digital Preservation Certifications
     • Nancy McGovern –ready to start having calls with people who are interested in participating
       • Winston Atkins, Amy Kirchhoff, Emily Shaw, Kate Zwaard expressed interest
     • Andrea – scoping question – Will this cover mainly formal certifications, or also include maturity models, levels of preservation?
       • Nancy is particularly interested in self-assessment and options for peer reviewed audit, not just formal audit
       • Needs to be encouraging, not prohibitive
     • John Spencer – from employer perspective, adds to CV and qualifications of folks doing this work
     • Nancy had a call with Courtney Mumma (Archivematica) – Archivematica is interested in hosting a Drupal-based TRAC review, will start a pilot May-August with two different institutions (one archive and one research library)
       • Process to map out what a peer-review audit process for digital repositories would look like
       • Peer review process = host institution rotates, other institutions participate in the review
         • Potentially low-cost way to go from self-assessment to audit
       • Mary Vardigan – Data Seal of Approval – transitioning from Board of Reviewers to a more community model; community starts to take over peer review activities to make it sustainable
       • Andrea asks if this would be FOS, like other Archivematica’s products
         • Nancy thinks so, but would need to confirm
       • Nancy offered to host a Webex walk-through of the TRAC certification
   • Digital Preservation metrics – Annie Peterson (Tulane) and Helen Bailey (MIT) joined the call to ask group about metrics related to digital preservation
     • Background on ARL Preservation Statistics
       • Collected 1999-2008 - asked budget, staffing, conservation statistics, binding, microfilming
       • Useful for comparing preservation activities across institutions, but always imperfect
         • In particular, digital preservation, AV, disaster – none were included
       • Drawing on 2010 Lars Meyer ARL report (Safeguarding Collections at the Dawn of the 21st Century: http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/safeguarding-collections.pdf), ALA/ALCTS/PARS is working on a survey to fill the void left when ARL stopped collection these stats
       • Annie and Helen walked group through survey draft preview, particularly Section 6: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2012-preservation-of-access-PREVIEW
         • A few suggestions:
           • Content size, rather than number of items for various types of content might be more meaningful, easier to know
           • Audit? might be too soon
           • Outsourcing vs. in-house
           • Question 6 currently excludes all institutions that do not have a digital repository; might rethink/reword this
     • Contact for Annie Peterson: epeters5@tulane.edu
       • Feedback would be most useful by March 25th
3. Update on projects:
   • PDF/A-3 Charter
     • Sheila Morrissey
       • meeting of PDF/A experts at recent DPC meeting in Leeds (http://www.dpconline.org/events/details/55-DPC_PDFA3_briefing?xref=58)
       • recognized that they have some seriously confused use cases
       • report will be written up about that meeting – will distributed
         • no solution as yet, “need to do some education”
   • WikiProject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_preservation)
     • Dina sent recent update via email list
       • Moving image section migrated from Google Drive draft to Wikipedia article
         • A couple of other contributors made edits that were biased toward specific file formats
           • So, Linda Tadic helped edit it again to remove that bias
       • Email preservation section on hold until contributors have time to work on it
4. Staffing survey
   • Publish report team - a good draft has been written, should be finished by end of April and ready to share
     • Not yet sure where to publish; definitely will be shared with NDSA members, but looking to share more broadly as well
     • Surprise (per Andrea) - number of digital preservation functions people wanted to do in-house rather than outsourcing
     • Not surprising - many activities are under-resourced, not enough staff to do everything
   • Archive team
   • Writing metadata for archiving in ICPSR; will link data and final report
5. Anything else?
   • Nope
6. Next call: April 15th, 2013