NDSA:I can haz standards workshop notes

Meeting Notes

I Can Haz Standardz, Session #5

NDIIPP/NDSA Partners Meeting Workshop

July 20, 2011

1:45 – 3:00 pm

Presenters: Andrea Goethals and Jimi Jones

Attendees: Vickie Allen, Micah Altman, Janice Snyder Anderson, Raphael Barbau, David Brooks, Colleen Cahill, Glenn Clatworthy, Bob Downs, Justin Littman, Bill Lefurgy, Eugene Mopsik, Nicole Joniec, Kate Mayo, Aaron Trehus, Gail McMillan, Charles Kolb, Josh Stromfeld, Lesley Parilla, Sone Nalensone, Kathleen O’Neill, Joe Servash, Michael Neubert, Gina Jones, Deborah Rossum, Arnold Rots, John Martinez, Stephen Davis, Sue Manus, Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, John Spencer, Patricia Murphy, Steve Morris, Helen Hockx-Yu, Meg Phillips, Shannon Niou, Kate Murray

Highlights The NDSA Standards and Best Practices Working Group is working on a standards survey that has the following objectives: • Identify and describe existing digital preservation standards and best practices • Identify opportunities for collaboration with non-NDSA individuals and organizations who are currently working on digital preservation standards and best practices • Identify gaps in digital preservation standards and best practices coverage that could be addressed by this working group in future activities

At the workshop, the attendees broke up into five separate groups to discuss the standards survey project and to create well-defined use cases for the standards survey project. The groups discussed who would use the survey, why they would use it, and what information would be needed. The groups entered their discussion notes into the NDSA Standards wiki and provided a quick verbal summary at the end of the meeting.

Table 1: Faculty, students, professionals, content creator, managers of digital content, need for international clearinghouse for registry of standards, cultural heritage organizations, SLA, ALA, AMIA, VRA, DLF, BPE, etc. How will it be used? How will people access this? Proprietary formats? Difficult to get manufacturers to move away from proprietary formats. Promote NISO, AES, FADGI, etc. Didn’t get a chance to talk aobut better tool.

Table 2: Issues to consider: who will maintain this? Where will it live? As new versions of standards come into being, what happens to old ones from the survey? Who would use it: search by institutions who are using particular standards. Metadata model at IU to map out preservation standards. LibraryThing (tool) has a way to put a database together. It also has a media tool that allows you to link discussions about an item to the item. Expression Engine, Drupal with Jack Brighton. LibraryThing could be a model, not the tool.

Table 3: Possible use cases. Add related projects to the survey tool. Big issues around the presentation of the data. Data needs to stay current. Digital presentation policy, education and training, reformatting community, data migration, new standards development, gap analysis, content creators, tool developers, procurement process mandate the use of open standards, avoiding redoing existing work. XML database, use Oxygen to develop user interface.

Table 4: scope of this. Should it extend to best practices rather than standards. Going wider, making the project bigger. Diverse kinds fo file formats flooding in, what kinds of judgements have people made? Ingest grids – share that information. What will the payoff for this effort be? Sustainability. The bigger it gets the more effort it takes to keep it up over time. Set up a prototype for one strict focus (AV file formats) rather than investing in everything from the get-go.

Table 5: Useful, but maintenance is a problem. The current data model is too complicated for Google docs. There are certain cases where you wouldn’t need all that information. Idea of alternative or complementary mechanism to gather information about the most relevant documents and standards. Survey starting with NDSA members and then send it out to wider group. Ask what they are using and what gaps have they found? We could do it annually to see trends in standards use. That would be helpful for standards writers.

Brief overview that highlights the topics covered during the meeting.

Two things for attendees to help with is to determine who would use a standards survey and why. How would you use it? Do you know of any good tools for data entry for surveys like this? The information needs to be entered, stored and then delivered via search, sort, filtering, etc. Initially thought this would be used by information professionals who need access to all the different types of standards in one place. And maybe students. Maybe developers could pick standards they would use with specific tools.

Table 2

Should only list institutions that are currently using the standard

Who will maintain this? crowd? or one institution?

Is it important to know who's using the standard?

Do we purge old versions of standards - standards no one is using? (can "dead" stuff go to a separate place)

Would use this as a tool to see what exists and who is using/doing what?

"this is a project that sounds like ours and this is what they're using?" - would mean that we have to be able to search by organization

Be able to search by type of material - "x is doing y - I'm also doing y...."

Take a look at the IU - Jen Riley's metadata organization model

Relational database of some kind - LibraryThing is something we should look at. Some fields that the general user can input and others are protected

We should take a look at WordPress

Talk to Jack Brighton about Expression Engine

Table 3

Possible use cases: Digital preservation policy

Education/Training

Developing funding proposals/research

Funding organizations

Reformatting community: analog to digital

Data migration

Adoption patterns/community

New standards development

Gap analysis for developing new standards

Creating new born digital content need systems. Content must be viable over long term. Need easy to use tool. Software tool developers

Procurement process (which might mandate use of open standards)

History of digital standards

Avoiding redoing existing work

Possibly add to survey: related projects

Big issues around presentation and data input for group; usefulness depends on content staying current

Table 4

test

-- scope: descriptive? standards / guidelines / practices

-- use cases: newbie, student, new project planners, hardware purchase decisions; developers; preparing outsource specification

-- difficulty to maintain over time? distributed mode with editor? Regular request to community for updates?

-- standards in use around table: METS, PREMIS, ASE, DACS, EAD, PeDALS; Astronomy FITS; RDF;

-- what about file format standards? what about best practices for preservation and access?

-- Questions: need more use cases to justify? What about standards and practices still needed? Gap analysis?

-- use format / community-based, investigation / organization

Table 5

1. Software developers -Just need minimal information - titles, links, maybe tags -goal - need to work in aoarticular problem. Space

Useful to know if the standard is dead, still used

2. Tools Google fusion tables Freebase?