NDSA:November 17, 2010 Standards Working Group Notes

NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group

First phone meeting

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

In attendance:

• Jimi Jones, Library of Congress (working group co-chair) – note taker

• Andrea Goethals, Harvard University (working group co-chair)

• Shane Beers, University of Michigan

• Kris Carpenter Negulescu, Internet Archive

• Mary Vardigan, Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)

• Karen Cariani, WGBH

• Matt Schultz, Educopia Institute, MetaArchive

• John Spencer, BMS/Chace

The first order of business was a round-robin introduction of the participants.

Next we decided to dive into the Standards Group Scope Statement edits. We proceeded from a document that both Andrea and Mary had contributed edits to.

We turned first to the Statement of Purpose for the group, which was divided into two options. First was boilerplate derived from the NDSA website:

“The Standards and Practices Working Group will develop, follow and promote effective methods for selecting, organizing, preserving and serving digital content.”

Mary said that she was fine with the above boilerplate text. We then looked at the second option on our draft:

“The Standards and Practices Working Group will work to facilitate a community-wide understanding of the role of standards in digital preservation and how to use them effectively to ensure durable collections.”

Andrea liked the second paragraph more because of its outreach quality. Your humble note taker (Jimi) opined that he prefers the second paragraph because of its “outcomes” quality – it focuses on the outcomes we want to achieve with the work that we do. Karen agreed that it puts our working group’s future work into the context of “furthering knowledge.” It is also more concrete about what we want to do than the first option, which is a lot more high-level and conceptual.

Karen asked if we want to get into the business of recommending best practices. Mary said that perhaps our group’s focus should be “identifying and promoting”standards, which seems to follow from our proposed “Current Scope of Work” (more on that in a bit). John said that our working group could be seen more as disseminators of information about standards and practices. Again, this seems to fit very well with our scope of work. Matt agreed with both John and Mary about our working group’s role as disseminating and promoting standards.

We then turned to the Practices section of the scope statement.

We added the Annual conference to our list of means by which the group will work and collaborate. We also added the LC-hosted wiki (which is forthcoming) to the list. I have since revised the document to add the NDSA IdeaScale space to this list (http://ndsa.ideascale.com/).

Karen noted that we could use a Google Docs space to collate work at least until the wiki is up and running. During a meeting this week Michelle Gallinger here at LC informed me that the wiki spaces should be up and running in the next few weeks. I am hopeful that our space will be up by the time of our next working group meeting (the week of December 6) so that we can take a look at it on WebEx. I am fully confident that it’s going to be a standard wiki space with no surprises.

We do not have a firm date for our annual meeting. The assumption is that it will coincide with the NDIIPP partners’ meeting in July-ish 2011, but Yours Truly was not certain if this would be the case (although all agreed it would be logical).

We then moved to the Participation section of the document.

Andrea walked us through the information already in this draft. She told us that she thought about adding a note about how participation in regular meetings is an expectation of working group members but all agreed that this would be unnecessary since, as Andrea said, “we’re all adults.”

Kris noted that when people signed on to be NDSA members many people (if not all) were assigned automatically to all groups so it’s possible that our list of members isn’t completely representative of who’s actively participating in the group.

Andrea said we should keep the Participation section simple and all agreed. It’s unlikely the text as it stands will change much in further drafts.

Then we moved into the meatiest section of the document, the Current Scope of Work section.

We decided first that the first task that we set ourselves to should be completed by Summer 2011. John asked if the “Action Teams” can interface with people outside the United States. I said that yes, that’s possible. I’ve since added some language to that effect in the newer draft of the scope statement that Andrea and I are working on. The task that we are considering as our first work for the group is to “Survey and document the digital preservation standards landscape.” Mary recommended we look at the University of Montreal’s MetaMap project (http://www.mapageweb.umontreal.ca/turner/meta/english/whatfor.html#MET) as inspiration for what we want to do. I mentioned Jenn Riley’s work on the “Seeing Standards” visualization of the world of metadata at Indiana University: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/~jenlrile/metadatamap/.

Andrea said that it would be a good idea to create a compilation of standards in order to see what the gaps are. This could lead to future work for our group in addressing those gaps. Andrea said it would be very important to the larger community if we plan on publishing our findings.

There was a question about whether this publication would be a page on the NDSA website. This is something I would have to explore. A suggestion was made that it would be great to have this survey exist in a wiki format that was dynamic and continually updated by the working group. John said it would be interesting to see this information in a columnar, spreadsheet-style that could function as an “At-A-Glance” document.

Matt said that perhaps we should anticipate some outreach/communication with bodies who are producing standards now. In other words, we need to keep our ears to the ground and do our best to include standards that are in development and not just fully finished work. I opined that it would be great to maintain this kind of communication. The more people know about what we’re doing the easier it will be for us – we can work towards having information come to us as much (or more!) than we have to seek it out.

Matt said that we should make sure that we are continually leaving open the door for working group members going off and doing work and research and then bringing new ideas back to the group. John likened this to the Grammy Deliverables Committee (I hope I wrote that down correctly) in that our action teams can act as liaisons between our working group and other committees/bodies.

Andrea asked the group if there are other ideas for work projects that people want to contribute. Kris said that we should be sure to make it clear that if members of the working group want to do other activities in parallel to this one they should feel free to bring these ideas up with us. Andrea and Jimi both followed on Kris’ comment by saying that its critical for us to make explicit that every member of the group has a vote and that yes, other work can happen alongside this (or any)project. Just because this phone meeting teased out this particular job of work doesn’t mean that all members must necessarily follow along.

Kris (in reference to the “does anyone have any other ideas” question) mentioned work being done in the UK on the idea of protecting anonymity in instances of data loss reporting. Andrea said this is great work to follow as it would fit in with data recovery best practices. John agreed saying that this kind of work would be very valuable because “no one wants to fess up to having a bad asset.”

There was another idea that it would be great to take a look at the auditing and certification processes for institutions to become Trusted Digital Repositories. A lot of institutions get priced out of this kind of certification because of limited budgets. The will may be there but the budget may be too weak. Matt agreed that this analysis would be needed. I mentioned that Carl and I talk about “levels of achievement” in terms of audio digitization. For example a low level of achievement would be using low-end equipment to digitize and store audio assets. A high level of achievement would be something like the custom-made “critical listening environments” and digital audio workstations at the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia. Perhaps this working group could generate something similar in terms of “gold, silver and bronze” levels of certification/achievement in the digital preservation realm.

At this point we were coming up on time so I recommended using the IdeaScale space for our working group to articulate these ideas and start getting feedback from the larger group. Even if we don’t get to them in this year’s work we can keep them in reserve for future work.

I said that I would send out a Doodle poll to lock down a date/time in the week of December 6, 2010 for our next meeting, which will likely be a WebEx. We all agreed that we should schedule monthly meetings to get this digital preservation standards survey work underway.

We then briefly talked about what the deliverables would be for this project. We identified the “raw data” (Andrea’s term) and some kind of summarized resource (likely the web resource/wiki that we discussed). Matt said that this resource could be a clearinghouse for digital preservation standards.

We identified “late spring 2011” as a rough target for a rough draft of the survey and Summer 2011 as the rough target for the final draft. John said he would happily put some employees on this work. Kris said that it might make sense to have a small group within the working group put together a strawman draft and then open it up to the larger group for comments. Then this smaller group can work on refining it.

Andrea said that it would be good to look for existing categorizations of digital preservation standards as inspiration for our project.

This is where we left the meeting. We’ll look at the revised draft (revised by Andrea and me) of the scope statement at our early December 2010 meeting. I am hopeful that we’ll be able to take a brief spin through our group’s wiki space. We will also work on refining our scope of work as well.

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