NDSA:February 22, 2012 Standards Working Group Notes

NDSA Standards Working Group Meeting Notes, 2/22/2012, 3 pm Eastern

Meeting will be recorded. No objections noted.

Topic 1: Google Document and Wikipedia Entry on Preservation

Andrea Goethals walked the group through the work being done.

The article is being drafted in GoogleDocs (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1efjrPtREvTdz8TN2KfuZ4GlarqEEfImFC7wGQYm4PNo/edit). We would like to use Wikipedia as a tool for documenting standards and best practices in Digital Preservation. The group is looking at the topic of “digital preservation” broadly. Andrea has created a WikiProject for Digital Preservation and we are using Digital Preservation Wikipedia article as a portal onto which to hook other pages. Stephen Davis and Priscilla Caplan are reworking the page with a new outline. The current thought is that there will be a scope section, a definition, and then the page will break off into digital preservation communities. From bullet 4 down will discuss digital preservation from library and archives perspective, with the intention that other communities could come along and add sections to address their perspective. A lot of this information will be blown out into separate article pages.

For next steps, Stephen is starting from bottom and Priscilla from the top to flesh out the document. Stephen will pull in pieces from the existing article that are good to use.

The thought is we will keep the top article general and link to more specific articles.

Anyone who wants to join in the work should ask for permission to edit the document from Stephen, he’d be happy to give access.

Topic 2: Staffing Survey

The staffing survey planning page was in NDSA standards Wiki. If you don’t have access, ping Jimi Jones. (It has since moved to Google Docs at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QoNiJkoZuFjGPijnC7KPjk1ry9IDKyPWF_qCRZzo3wg/edit -- contact Andrea for editing priveleges). This is a project relating to staffing for digital preservation and digital preservation project. We want to circulate the survey in the next couple of months. It’d be nice to get it out by the beginning of April so we could get results back by June and have something to show at NDIIPP meeting in July.

Use Cases should clarify what we are trying to do with it.

We took a look at the use cases. The people on this call agreed they had looked at them and felt they aligned with what Meg had in mind, originally. There were no concerns or additions at this time.

We took a look at the questions and it was agreed that they align well with the use cases.

• Folks felt there were a lot of free-text type questions that we should turn into multiple choice questions.
• People agreed that Linda Tadic’s email circulate version of the survey is more recent than what is on the Wiki and folsk like that verison. It addresses commercial staffing issues. Linda also had a few broader strokes and we like where she is coming from. She made clear that certain questions are branching (only answer 13 if you answer 12)
• A call participant wondered if we should try to address a consortial model of preservation, as many folks are going this route to try and do digital preservation cheaper. Megan is going to come up with some questions to specifically address this.
• We had a discussion about how there were too many questions and we might need to trim to make the survey shorter and less burdensome. Perhaps we could offer less branching?
  • We took a closer look at questions 4 to 7 in Linda’s version and decided these were more about infrastructure and were not core to the purpose of this survey.
  • We have not seen the infrastructure group survey, so Andrea will forward it to us.
  • We definitely want to keep the first couple of demographic questions, so we can place the rest of the answers in context.
  • There is still a lot of free-text in Linda’s version, though a few are more quantitative.
• Should we include questions about outsourcing? For example, outsource the whole of digital preservation to the IT department or maybe just outsourcing storage to the cloud
  • The original intention was a survey about people who want to do digital preservation themselves, however we are not sure this is for the best, because outsourcing is so pervasive.
  • We want the people who answer the survey to consider themselves responsible for digital preservation and outsourcing some of that work is a valid approach and it can affect the staffing model in place. It would help us understand their staffing numbers if we knew what functions were outsourced.
  • In some ways, this is pretty similar to the consortial model.
• We decided to add use cases to the Wiki about consortial models and outsourcing (Megan will give it a go).
• Do we want a question about whether organization has a specific line item in the budget for dig preservation and if so, what is the amoun? This is a way to try and get at organizational commitment and investment.
  • For some organizations (such as ICPSR) a question like #9 is tricky because it is spread out across the entire organization and they’d have to put their entire budget in to cover this.
  • We think this may be a really, really hard question to answer. Many times there are activities that are completed for multiple purposes, rather than a straight line item for digital preservation. While this is interesting information, it could be very hard to tease out.
• We felt that all questions should be optional.
• We had a decision about the exact number of questions to which we should limit the survey, but did not come to a consensus.
• Some questions we think we discussed deleting:
  • #15 is really hard to answer, so may be a good one to delete.
  • On the original survey, the question about type of organization we should excise.
  • Do we need to ask about both skills and educational background? We’d prefer just skills and don’t need both questions.
  • Mixed feelings about number of free text boxes. Answers are hard to manipulate.
  • #22 and 23 are really similar.
  • Many folks are concerned about asking about titles. An organization devoted solely to preservation could end up needing to list title of everyone in the organization, especially for a preservation based organization.
    • Perhaps we could turn into a multiple choice list with classes of titles or specializations
    • Nice if not just yes/no, but could insert a number to indicate number of staff
    • Could we relate question #9 with the question about what does what?
    • Do we want to ask people both what they have and what the ideal is? Can we combine it into one question? Arguments both ways. Think about what happens if you are trying to use this to argue for more staff? Maybe for each question we ask the tangential … has this been adequate for you? There was some worry that it’ll be hard to get useful data on the ideal.
    • Instead we could ask a matrix type of question, Is this working well for your organization: strongly agree or strongly disagree.
    • One goal is to ask questions that allow us to ferret out if you’ve got plenty of people to do planning, but no one to do the actual technical implementation (for example).
  • # 16 asking what is necessary, but no alternate asking what you have. If only going to include 1, should ask what you have.

We agreed that it seemed a good moment to “scrub” the survey. It might make sense to reimplement as a grid model where we ask each question once, but have columns of answers:

• Now
• Happy with this
• What would you like to have

We agreed to move Linda’s version of the survey over to Google docs scrub it over next 30 days. Folks can add questions to the document directly or via email. We will also update the use cases on the Wiki.