NDSA:December 6, 2010 Standards Working Group Notes

NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group

Second phone meeting

Monday, December 6, 2010

In attendance:

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

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

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

• Karen Cariani, WGBH

• Matt Schultz, Educopia Institute, MetaArchive

• John Spencer, BMS/Chace

• Amy Rudersdorf, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources

• Michelle Gallinger, Library of Congress

This meeting focused on looking through and giving final thoughts on the second draft of the NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group’s Scope Statement. After our first phone meeting Jimi Jones (yours truly) edited the first draft of the statement to reflect this group discussion. Then Andrea Geothals, the group’s other co-chair did a pass and disseminated that draft to the group prior to this phone meeting.

The group looked through the Statement of Purpose section. All agreed that this text is good and represents well the goals and purposes of the group.

We then turned to the Practices section, which lists what the communication methods will be for the group. Jimi added “phone conferences” to the “WebEx” bullet in this list. Michelle informed us that the NDSA wiki workspaces will be up and running “in the next couple weeks.”

The group agreed that the text in the Participation section was acceptable but there were some questions regarding the “action team” concept. The questions centered on whether non-NDSA members can join action teams of their own accord, without up/down votes from the working group members. The concern is that the harder we make it for people to work in the action teams the more exclusionary we make involvement in/with the NDSA. Clearly this could obviate the contributions that smaller institutions – many of whom have much to offer in terms of innovation and expertise but do not have the time or staff to contribute to the NDSA more regularly – can make to NDSA work. Jimi said that perhaps we should bracket our discussion of the action teams and that the details of the action teams should be worked out at the December 15-16 NDSA organizing meeting. In other words, action teams should be defined above the working group level so that all the groups will be operating in the same way with regard to these teams.

We then turned to the longest section – the Scope of Work. This is the section that details the work that the Standards group will do over the next year. All agreed that this section – and the work it lays out – is good as it stands. Amy Rudersdorf, who was not on our first call in November – asked if this project was too broad. Andrea replied that it is admittedly a very broad project but its breadth will allow our working group members to divvy up the work such that people play to their strengths. Amy asked if the outcome of this work will be suggestions for best practices – something that JISC is already doing. Andrea said that the resource we generate will differ from JISC’s work in that it will not be a series of best practices/recommendations but rather more of an “annotated bibliography” of what is already extant. In other words, where JISC is giving advice, we would be creating a map of what advice is out there. Standards group members would design a template that would be applied for each entry in our survey. John recommended that the most logical way to divvy up the survey (both the work creating it and the final deliverable resource) would be by categories like “institutional audio,” “moving image” and so on. In this way we can break up the work within the group based on who’s interested in what and/or whose institution works with what.

Michelle said that this sounds like a very useful resource for the general digital preservation community. Your humble note taker would add that it could be highly useful for students and teachers of digital preservation as well. Andrea said that one of the strengths to this plan is that we will identify not just what is out there but what isn’t. This “gap analysis” can be very useful to this working group as well – it can help us identify what needs we can work to fill over time.

We discussed what the final resource would be – a web resource? A wiki? Would it be hosted by LOC? Who will be editing it over time? We decided that this conversation wasn’t the time to figure all this out and that our work-centric discussions in early spring 2011 could begin to tease this out. Amy asked about long-term maintenance of this resource – keeping it up to date and viable over time – and the group agreed that this must be a consideration. This is another key concept that will need to be figured out over the course of this project.

Ultimately the group agreed that this work is, generally speaking, a good direction for the first year of the NDSA Standards working group. Our meetings in 2011 will more closely delineate the deliverables and the schedule. These meetings will also define how we’re breaking up the work of this group. There was a question about whether other work will be allowed to run in parallel to the survey of standards work. The group assembled here agreed that it is very important to be egalitarian and not exclude any ideas for other work. Any working group member can put forth ideas and organize action teams around their ideas. This is another argument for keeping the IdeaScale space alive and thriving. I would argue that our monthly meetings (starting in 2011) should always make time to discuss new ideas (whether they’ve been listed on IdeaScale or not) in order to help make sure that all participants have a voice. Jimi made minor changes to the scope statement throughout the discussion. He agreed to create and circulate a Doodle poll to figure out when our standing monthly phone/WebEx meeting should be. These meetings will begin in January 2011.

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