NDSA:Meeting Minutes 02-27-12

NDSA Innovation Working Group Call: February 27, 2012 12:00pm-1:00pm

In attendance

• Jane Mandelbaum, Library of Congress
• Micah Beck, University of Tennessee
• Barbara Taranto, New York Public Library
• Linda Tadic, Audiovisual Archive Network
• Trevor Owens, Library of Congress
• Jefferson Bailey, Library of Congress

[A few people joined after the conversation started, but we did not get their names. If you want to be listed, please add yourself or ping Jefferson and he will add you]

Overview

This was a quick, focused call that primarily updated group members on the status of ongoing activities, especially the Insights interview series, the Innovation Awards program, and the Google Summer of Code (SOC) project. We also discussed some future project ideas at the end of the call.

Interviews

• Gary Wright sent in his interview with Jason Pierson at FamilySearch. It will be on the blog soon.
• Trevor has completed his interview with Bram van der Werf of Open Planets Foundation. It will be on the blog soon.
• Micah Beck will continue to pursue his interview with Jan Schmidt at NYPL on performing arts preservation.
• Jefferson will continue to pursue his interview with Stanford Digital Forensics Lab. He is awaiting responses.
• Jefferson is awaiting a response from an interview with Wikimedia's US Cultural Partnership Coordinator, Lori Phillips.
• Trevor is working on an interview with the folks at NIST.
• Jane did an interview with Joe Lambert of the Center for Digital Storytelling. It will be on the blog soon.
• There was also an idea about coordinating our interview series with Nova or Slashdot or some other media entity.

Awards Action Team

• The nomination web form is completed and we hope to get the announcement out this week. The group will be notified via the NDSA-All list and we will be actively soliciting ideas from people by announcing it widely throughout the community.
• These awards highlight and commend creative individuals, projects, organizations, and future stewards demonstrating originality and excellence in their contributions to the field of digital preservation. We are looking to reward risk-taking and inventiveness when it comes to supporting digital preservation. Projects need not be overtly technical and we want to encourage initiatives or individuals from outside the normal digital stewardship community to be nominated.
• Working group members are highly encouraged to help promote the awards, solicit nominations, and make nominations. The program's success will depend upon the quality of the nominations. Expect to hear more once the program is announced.

Summer of Code

• There was a call about GSOC detail on 02/10/12. Notes from the call are on the wiki NDSA:Summer of code
• The main takeaway from DuraSpace was that the projects that have been the most successful were the ones that were well scoped by the time that the students actually got down to doing the work.
• The GSOC application period is open! Applicants have until Friday, March 9 to apply. See this link for more information, http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2012/02/mentoring-organization-applications-now.html

Ideas

• Barbara mentioned the idea of looking at innovative ideas for re-imagining the preservation world, challenging unexamined assumptions, and challenging convention wisdom (such as accepted ideas of appraisal, format, how long things need to be preserved, etc).
• This could be organized around the fundamental questions of digital preservation. We have the technology to address the need, but should we re-question the needs themselves?
  • This could be interviews (David Rosenthal, Ethan Miller, and Abbey Smith were mentioned)
  • This could be a workshop associated with a conference.
  • This could be conversations over the listservs or with external people.
  • This could be anything that recalibrates the conversation.
• Micah will provide his slides from his talk at Indiana, "Can We Do Digital Preservation?" on this topic

Other

• The NDSA Coordinating Committee meeting is at the end of March. If you have any questions or issues that you want raised at the meeting, please contact on of the working group chairs.
• We will send out a Doodle poll soon for scheduling the March call and will ensure it does not conflict with the committee meeting.