NDSA:Meeting Minutes 11-18-11

NDSA Innovation Working Group Planning Call: November 18th, 1:00pm, 2011

In attendance

• Jane Mandelbaum, Library of Congress
• Micah Beck, University of Tennessee
• Mike Smorle, University of Maryland
• Kris Carpenter, Internet Archive
• Barbara Taranto, New York Public Library
• Gary Wright, Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• Jennifer Ricker, State Library of North Carolina
• Micah Altmen, Harvard University
• Ido Peled, Ex Libris Group
• Butch Lazorchak, Library of Congress
• Michelle Gallinger, Library of Congress
• Trevor Owens, Library of Congress
• Jefferson Bailey, Library of Congress

Overview

The first goal of this call was to solicit ideas and potential interviewers to contribute to the ongoing interview series on the NDIIPP digital preservation blog (The Signal) speaking with people both within, and outside of, the digital preservation world about interesting projects related to digital preservation stewardship or activities. The second goal was to recruit additional action team members for the Innovation Recognition Awards team and to encourage ideas on the types of awards that can be presented. The third goal was to discuss the Innovation Working Group's plan to participate in Google's "Summer of Code" project.

Action Items

Interviews:

• Create a space on the wiki for listing previous interview subjects, current suggestions, and for people to add future suggestions
• Those who volunteered to conduct interviews (listed below) should move forward contacting their interviewees and work with Trevor and other LC team-members to develop a framework of interview questions

Awards:

• Add Barbara Taranto to action team
• Update Wiki as the action team moves forward with choosing 3-5 areas to award

Summer of Code:

• Working Group members interested in participating need to have identified mentors and projects, ideally, by mid January. Google announces the project in late January or early February and projects then have 2 weeks to apply. Kris Carpenter can provide guidance on the application process
• Schedule next call for the week of December 11 and also schedule the January call

Interviews

• Barbara Taranto suggested, and will follow up with, Beverly Emmons, who won a Tony for lighting design for Amadeus and is creating a digital archive of lighting design
• Micah Beck suggested interviewing people working on annotating dance and that there are projects going on in this area at UMD and the Kennedy Center. A good contact for following up on this would be the Dance Heritage Coalition.
• Gary Wright suggested Sam Gustman of the Shoa Foundation which is doing cloud-based digital preservation services
• Ido Peled suggested talking to James Mullin, Director of Libraries at Purdue, about the work they are doing preserving digital research data

Awards Action Team

• Barbara Taranto from NYPL will join the action team
• Action team call minutes and decisions will be posted to the wiki
• The next full Working Group call we can discuss ideas for soliciting nominations

Summer of Code

Details:

• Projects can focus on new tools (prototypes) or add-ons and plug-ins for existing tools
• Students, usually graduate computer science majors, work remotely, and are matched with a mentor that needs to be a solid technical person and a coder themselves
• Projects need to be bounded, 2-3 months, and need to be able to be completed within the project time frame
• Projects can be innovative prototyping; they won't be useful code but more speculative or proof-of-concept level
• Need a profile of the mentor that will be working with the student
• Biggest need is to find mentors
• Identify an institution and a mentor and a project idea (mentor needs to be able to write code and troubleshoot and guidance for prototyping)

Ideas:

• Automating quality assurance of web content
• Crowd sourcing transcription or tagging projects for digitized manuscripts
• Plug-ins to simplify the publishing process as far as ingest and transfer
• Genealogy or family research databases and tools for transcription or tagging of that information
• Neighborhood Watch ideas which could just be some simple code to stitch together some existing CMS tools – Micha Altman can talk to the UNC/Datapass people and see if there is possibility here
• Possible Duraspace and Omeka plug-in ideas
• Possibility of some technical LC staff serving as mentors

Offers:

• Jennifer Ricker might have mentor opportunities b/c they are using Flickr right now for tagging
• Micah Altman thinks Harvard has the resources but only if they can do a project that fits internal needs

Deadlines:

• Need a mentor profile and project plan before Google announcement in late January, early February
• Once announced, there are two weeks to submit a proposal
• Kris from IA can supply parts of previous applications to give guidance to writing the proposal

Other

• Next call should be week of December 11 so as to avoid holiday crunch
• Also schedule January call via Doodle poll
• On a future call, discuss ideas around Google Web Graphs