NDSA:Content WG January 30,2013 Meeting Minutes

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Wednesday, January 30, 2013, 1-2pm ET

Attendees (18)

• Abrams, Brett | National Records and Archives Administration | Brett.Abrams@nara.gov
• Baker, Timothy D. | Maryland State Archives | tim.baker@maryland.gov
• Caizzi, Carolyn | Northwestern University | carolyn.caizzi@northwestern.edu
• Coates, Midge | Auburn University | coatemi@AUBURN.EDU
• Daigle, Bradley | University of Virginia | bradley@virginia.edu
• Grotke, Abbie | Web Archiving Team Lead, Library of Congress, and Co-Chair of the NDSA Content Working Group | abgr@LOC.GOV | 202-707-2833 | @agrotke
• Hartman, Cathy | Associate Dean of Libraries, University of North Texas/ Co-Chair of the NDSA Content Working Group | cathy.hartman@UNT.EDU
• Howard, Rachel | Digital Initiatives Librarian, University of Louisville | rachel.howard@LOUISVILLE.EDU
• Knies, Jennie | Manager, Digital Collections, University of Maryland | levjen@UMD.EDU
• Lazorchak, Butch | Library of Congress | wlaz@loc.gov
• McAninch, Glen | Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives | Glen.McAninch@ky.gov
• McMillan, Gail | Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University | gailmac@vt.edu
• Paranick, Amber | Library of Congress | ampa@loc.gov
• Rau, Erik | Hagley Museum and Library | erau@hagley.org
• Reib, Linda | Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records | lreib@LIB.AZ.US
• Rossum, Deborah |Digital Content Manager| SCOLA |712-566-2202| drossum@SCOLA.ORG
• Stewart, Claire | Northwestern University | claire-stewart@northwestern.edu
• Truman, Gail | Truman Technologies | gail@trumantechnologies.com

No one agreed to take notes. Cathy will take notes, so Abbie can type into the brainstorming document on the wiki.

National Agenda

Abbie and Cathy provided an overview of the National Agenda for Digital Stewardship document that NDSA is preparing this year. The working groups are asked to send topics forward to be included. Abbie had prepared a brainstorming space on our CWG wiki and included ideas from the Big Picture Team there. A few additional ideas were suggested by the group and added to the wiki document. Please see those notes at: http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=CWG_Brainstorm

Abbie and Cathy noted that members should log onto the wiki and add ideas. During the call Abbie said she'd send the notes to the coordinating committee mid-February, but after the meeting learned that the coordinating committee will begin work immediately on drafting things, so the sooner we can get our ideas together the better. We ask that additional ideas be added by February 8th (or sent via the listserv for discussion).

Interviews for blog posts

Abbie reviewed the Activity Charter for the Content Interview Series. The interviews will be posted on the Signal blog. She had several suggestions from CWG member in email for interviwees and topics, and will work on moving this activity forward. More suggestions / ideas are needed and appreciated.

Content teams

Updates sent prior to the meeting are below. During the call we had a few other updates:

Erik reported the the Cultural Heritage team hasn't met in awhile but he's drafting a case study on oral histories.

GIS work group report on their discussions. They had a presentation from Diane Papineau the GIS Analyst at the Montana State Library on their last call. GIS lives in the library there, which is unusual. They think about collection development and appraisal, which is unusual in the geospatial community. The content team is working on a paper to make available on the NDSA site that offer guidance for organizations related to geospatial information. Montana is preserving multiple file types – following the OAIS model. The Geo group is planning a blog post around the Montana efforts. Abbie and Butch will work with Brett and Diane to move that ahead.

Abbie and Cathy stated again that case studies are not mandated for the Content Teams. Teams need to use the process that works for them. We encourage the teams to be active and continue the discussion. For example the Government team finds that they need a broader based approach than to advocate for a particular preservation strategy and will focus on standards and best practices. Maryland is talking about providing one case study from the Government team on the topic of a specific record group that includes land records (deeds, etc.).

JANUARY CONTENT TEAM UPDATES

BIG PICTURE

The big picture team met January 7 to discuss the National Agenda for Digital Stewardship, Minutes are posted here: http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=January_2013

GEOSPATIAL

The NDSA Geospatial content team has focused on bringing the learning into the community over the last couple of months by hosting a series of presentations on its monthly calls. In November 2012 the group hosted Wayne Graham, the head of Research and Development at the Scholar's Lab at the University of Virginia. Mr. Graham discussed their efforts, including the Neatline project to to develop a more robust capability to incorporate mapping into the Omeka digital library software.

He also discussed a number of software tools that power much of the Scholar's Lab activity, and some of which were unfamilar to the group members. With that in mind we hosted a call from Ben Bossung, the Senior Vice President at OpenGeo, a company tha develops and supports enterprise open source geospatial software. Mr. Bossung discussed the stack of tools that makes up the OpenGeo suite and took questions on how the tools might be implemented in a digital preservation context.

In addition to the presentations the group is furthering work on preparing the Geospatial content use case and is also beginning to explore collection development policies as they relate to collecting digital geospatial data at partner institutions. It is also preparing a geospatial data appraisal white paper.

Science, Technology, Medicine, and Mathematics

On December 4 we shared a link to our two case studies on the CWG listserv for feedback. Feedback is still welcome! In advance of a future meeting, the team would like to get a better sense for whether to continue developing the two current case studies or to begin work on others.

On a related note, I really like the idea of more interviews from the CWG for the Signal Blog. It may also be interesting to conduct a series of interviews with some of the stakeholders we are identifing in the case studies, in particular, some of the content creators, so we can better understand their processes of creating and maintaining digital records.

SOCIAL SCIENCE

No major news, but have updated the wiki and added a link to a Google Doc they are working on.

NEWS, MEDIA, JOURNALISM

The News, Media and Journalism finalized three case studies and distributed to the NDSA_ALL list for feedback.

1. Community and Hyperlocal News

2. Citizen Journalism

3. Digital E prints of of newspapers

http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Community_and_Hyperlocal_News

http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Citizen_Journalism

http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Digital_E-Prints_of_Newspapers

It would be very helpful to receive your feedback. Either via email to kristine@archive.org<mailto:kristine@archive.org> and I can distribute to the group. Or add comments directly to the wiki pages.

GOVERNMENT

Some of the Government Content Team met on January 10, 2013 and discussed how its previous planned projects fit with the Content group's goal to produce case studies. A draft document (attached) placed the projects in the context of the template offered by the Content Working Group, but the last part of the suggested outlined was not applied because the following categories seemed difficult to apply to the projects that had previous been determined: Strategic Value of Activity: trying to identify the most "at risk" or "historically important" electronic records in the context of government records in order to provide a focus for grant proposals or publishing is difficult because government agencies are mandated to save all records for a prescribed period according to retention schedules. Only those records that are most useful in electronic format (web sites, geospatial records, statistical data in spreadsheets or databases) are at risk of losing value if they are not saved in a format other than an electronic format. While the Geospatial Content Team is covering that particular type of government content, and there have been numerous successful government web archiving projects that use ArchiveIT, I know of few other types of electronic government records that need special attention. Relating big datasets in archives has been touted as a new area for attention. This topic is being explored mostly by Federal agencies and universities, but the team does not have the resources to explore this. One team member suggested that land records might make a suitable case study and NAGARA's Crossroads publication has expressed interest in such a study, but much would depend on the extent of the requirements for the case study. The obstacles for preservation of government electronic records in digital repositories are so substantial that many, if not most government archives, are at preliminary stages of constructing their repositories and thus are more concerned with practical management goals than in trying to focus on a particular content in their holdings from which to write a case study. State archives through the State Electronic Records Initiative (SERI) sponsored by the Council of State Archivists have several grant supported initiatives that focus on both education and tools/standards. Neither of these SERI activities necessarily call for case studies on particular electronic content, however there is an advocacy effort that seeks to justify preservation in general for state archives much the same way that the NDSA Advocacy Working group is doing. The Government Content Team has for the last two meetings faced dwindling participation. The co-chairs of the Government Content favor supporting SERI grant projects and have difficulty finding the resources to construct case studies based on the criteria outlined by the working group. I would be happy to discuss this individually with anyone who has questions about it or in the meeting on the January 30th.

Next Meeting

March 6 at 11 AM EST, then every other month after that for 2013. We hope for an in-person meeting at the July Dig Pres 2013 conference.

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