NDSA:Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Infrastructure Working Group Call, February 28, 2012, 2pm-3pm

Attending

• Trevor Owens, Library of Congress
• Karen Cariani, WGBH
• Jefferson Bailey, Library of Congress
• Dave MacCarn, WGBH
• Aaron Trehub, Auburn University
• Andrea Goethels, Harvard University
• Nada Yow, Columbia University
• Priscilla Caplan, FCLA
• Shawn Nicholson, Michigan State
• Micah Altman, MIT
• Linda Tadic, Audiovisual Archive Network
• Dean Farrell, UNC
• Corey Snavely, University of Michigan

Agenda

• Recap on the Encryption Discussion (and the storage topics conversation in general)
• Open Source conversations

Encryption Discussion and Storage Topics

• So far the conversations have been a success in what we are using the listserv more and gleaning key insights, however...
• 2-3 weeks does seem to be the lifespan for these posts and more input/detail is needed before creating a summary document
• Ideas:
  • Making these conversations public, such as on the NDSA blog
  • Bringing in outside voices to comment, annotate our conversations (Scott Bradnor, David Rosenthal, Nancy McGovern, Bob Chaddock at NARA, archival and records mgmt community, banking and movie industry -- all mentioned)
• Outside voices could help us see if we have missed identifying risks or strategies Value in taking it to the next level and having experts weigh in on it and have a forum for ongoing conversation.
• Next topic: compression
• Priscilla will frame the question. Potential starting points:
  • Is there an agreed-upon best practice for compression?
  • When they "tar up" an API, it isn't compressed.
  • Compression's impact on file structures as well as content.
  • Compression can be internal to a format or can be a wrapper.
  • Compression also ties into format migration and vendor-neutral storage questions.

OSS Converstion

Discussion:

• We still need to define the product and the audience better for this topic. Guidelines, best practices, or systematic decisions on build, buy, adopt decision around preservation structure infrastructure?
• List out pros and cons of certain approaches and the advantages & disadvantages of OSS.
• Do we want something summarizing common knowledge or something with more in-depth research and analysis?
• Suggested that we send the short summary of questions from the wiki to Michelle Kimpton or McKenzie Smith for feedback.
• Instead of a generic list, a few key decisions might be better or creating a narrower checklist limited to environment of preservation
• Do we loop in broader software evaluation decisions
• Perhaps we can tak FOSS4LIB and bring it down to a lower, more granular level focused on preservation
• Post to the listserv a list of suggested criteria in evaluating OSS and we can work from there.

Action items

• Jefferson to aggregate/summarize all encryption comments on the wiki (and will move all full-text emails into a google doc)
• Priscilla will formulate questions for the next conversation topic, revolving around compression
• Trevor will send a note to the list to start formulating an OSS criteria for decision-making
• Next call will be Tuesday, March 27, 2012 at 2pm EST