NDSA:Digital video exploration meeting notes

Return to the Digital video exploration

March 31, 2014

Roster

• Kate Murray, LC
• John Spencer, BMS/Chase
• Heather Heckman, USC
• Linda Tadic, AVAN/UCLA
• Carl Fleischhauer, LC
• Andrea Goethals, Harvard
• Winston Atkins, Duke
• Paula De Stefano, NYU
• Melitte Buchman, NYU
• Alex Bradley, GPO
• Dave MacCarn, WGBH
• Hannah Frost, Stanford
• Jack Kearney, Boston College
• Jimi Jones, UIUC
• John Rees, NLM
• Joe Pawletko, NYU
• Phil Ardery, LOC
• Michael Scott, MICA
• Martin Dow, ?

Discussion

Kate Murray led the discussion, and started by reviewing the exploration work thus far: there appears to be current interest and concern among the Standard and Practice WG around the topic of video, but because this topic is large and complex, the group feels it is necessary to poll the NDSA membership to better understand what aspect of video, at a high level, is the primary obstacle to stewardship of video content. What is it about video that makes it so challenging? The goal is to surface the answer(s) to this question and determine if there is something the WG can do to tackle an issue that supports and serves the needs of the membership. The current plan is to surface the key issues through a voluntary survey.

After the last exploratory meeting, Kate and Andrea grouped the existing brainstormed survey questions into over-arching themes (as seen on the NDSA:Digital video exploration page):

• Overall Challenges
• High-level Strategy / Resources / Funding
• Specifications / Standards / Modeling
• Tools / Technology / Workflow

The idea is to turn these high-level concepts into a short survey. The shorter, the better, in the interest of a high response rate. John Spencer suggested a ranking for themes (most challenging to least), plus an open comment field for free-text responses. Kate reminded us that free-text responses complicate the data analysis and reporting process. Several attendees expressed support for a free text field to help solicit context or explanation that may be useful given that the survey is high-level and short. A final determination regarding the format of the questions was not made.

The discussion then moved to scope of the survey: does it apply to reformatted video, born-digital video (BDV), or both? Originally Kate thought it was only BDV, but discussion on the March 10 call revealed that that reformatted video is also in scope. Hannah, Winston, Carl, Andrea and others expressed support for including both kinds of video in the scope, as the issues are relevant to both, and increasingly difficult to separate.

It will be important to make the scope of the survey clear to respondents. It was suggested that the survey could be two questions: one for reformatted video, one for BDV. Alternatively, we could allow respondents to indicate if their responses apply to reformatted, BDV, or both. On the other hand, one attendee posited that maybe the survey should simply focus on the challenges of video, regardless if it originated on tape or on disk.

Other points made about the survey:

• It must emphasize that this is about solving today’s problems, not anticipated / future problems
• It should be possible for a respondent to indicate if they do face video challenges (yet)
• Can the WG plan to work its way through all the issues flagged, in priority order?

In terms of survey logistics, LC has a Survey Monkey account that can be used (Barrie Howard has the details.) Linda Tadic suggested that Survey Gizmo is a useful tool.

We did not discuss timeline for preparing and distributing the survey or for analysis and reporting the survey results.

Action Items

1. Draft up notes and post to the wiki - Hannah Frost (completed)
2. Solicit volunteers to form a team for drafting the survey to be shared with the group on the next call - Kate Murray (completed)
3. Mock up first draft of survey - By NDSA:Survey drafting team members
4. Schedule the next call - Kate Murray

March 10, 2014

Roster

• Kate Murray, LC
• Barrie Howard, LC
• John Spencer, BMS/Chase
• Heather Heckman, USC
• Linda Tadic, AMPAS
• Carl Fleischhauer, LC
• Kara Van Malssen, AVPreserve
• Karen Cariani, WGBH
• Andrea Goethals, Harvard
• Winston Atkins, Duke
• Paula De Stefano, NYU
• Melitte Buchman, NYU
• Jesse Johnston, NEH
• Josh Sternfeld, NEH

Discussion

Kate Murray provided some background for this exploration: the Standards WG realized a lot of people are working on issues related to born-digital video (BDV). On the first call the participants discovered a need to capture a list questions because there are so many directions to take the exploration. The questions are listed here.

The scope of today's call is to review the questions, and organize or prioritize the list. The group should also consider choosing one or two specific questions to explore in depth, or aggregating sub-sets of questions under categories or themes that would seed a general survey to send out to NDSA members. There was clarification that BDV is not limited by format, e.g., HD or SD, or both. This was addressed because NYU has experienced that digital-deposit video formats are very different from those used for analog migrations. NYU recommended adding a question to address the issue of creating digital masters, and how to educate creators about BDV workflow.

FADGI is looking at workflow issues with its work on MXF. There was consensus that training and workshops are important since they impact processing workflows down the road. The questions were reviewed as a group, with the following additions:

• What technical formats are you using for BDV?
• With regular depositers, how far back in the chain of creation do you go to address digital video formats?
• Since not everyone has direct control, or the opportunity to reach out to the artists to influence file creation, what practices are you using with ingest processing for born-digital video?
  • Normalization
  • Keeping the original files
  • Monitoring
• What types of auxiliary files are you keeping along with the content, e.g., stills?
• How are you trying to model higher level objects, e.g., a single program spanning four tapes?

WGBH has discovered that the formats they receive is whatever is coming out of a camera. It's not a conscience choice of the creator. One way to manage what you can expect to receive is provide guidance on what kind of camera a creator should use based on the types of files they create.

As a next step, the group decided to:

1. Group the questions under specific themes or topics, e.g., ingest, file formats, etc.
2. Identify a survey model and tool, e.g., the storage survey started with a page on the wiki, and the working group first learned where they had consensus where they didn't. Then they created a more formal survey.
3. Design a simple, one-question, multiple-choice survey, with three-five high-level themes for responders to identify as their top issues for dealing with BDV.
4. Identify a process for disseminating the survey.
5. Disseminate a survey to the full NDSA membership

Everyone in this group has some familiarity with BDV, but can we reach the non-experts, who are receiving more video into their workflow? There's a lot of video content out there people are dealing with, which is not part of their preservation programs. Can we just reach out to the NDSA membership via the NDSA-ALL email list? This is a good place to start because the NDSA has a wide range of practioners from novice to expert.

The group completed a preliminary exercise in grouping the questions into themes:

1. Technical specifications around metadata, file formats, etc.
2. Reformatting physical media
3. Workflow, e.g., is your workflow different for access files versus preservation files?
4. Storage - ready access vs. long-term preservation storage
5. Tools
6. Policies, e.g., collection development policies or preservation program priorities
7. Rights issues, e.g., copyright, licensing, DRM

Action items

1. Draft notes & upload to the wiki - Barrie Howard (completed)
2. Group the questions under high-level themes - Andrea Goethals and Kate Murray (completed)
3. Share survey model developed by AMPAS for The Digital Dilemma 2 - Linda Tadic (completed on 3/10/14 - Thanks Linda!)
4. Set up another call on 3/31 - Kate Murray (complete)
   
   

February 7, 2014

Thanks to all for participating in the digital video brainstorming session on Friday afternoon! We had a great introductory discussion involving NDSA members from The Library of Congress, Harvard, Stanford, NYU, Columbia, University of South Carolina, CalTech, Duke, WGBH, and UCLA/Audiovisual Archive Network. For many of institutions, video is the last big genre of content that isn’t (well) supported in current digital preservation repository and access systems. MOOCs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course), collaborative projects and mass digitization also are areas of special interest. We discussed how we might best collect and compare data – perhaps through case studies (generalized or specific), formal survey, etc. In the end, we decided that we need to better define the questions we wanted to explore.

Our primary action item was to set up a new page on the wiki in order to capture questions and topics related to video to help us narrow our scope. We will have another meeting in a few weeks to discuss how we might organize and address the selected topics in a thoughtful way. We will set up a Doodle poll for the next meeting.

All NDSA Standards members are welcome to submit questions/comments on digital video to the wiki page:

Direct link to page on wiki: http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Digital_video_exploration&osindsawikipdb_session=e242a4804ce795249cac084b5af027e9

You can also get to the page through the main wiki page: http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Standards_and_Best_Practices_Working_Group (scroll down to Digital Video Exploration)