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 O'Neal, 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 that 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: There is an open question about if the email discussions are an end in and of themselves or if we want to try and glean insights from them to more broadly distribute and invite further discussion. Here are two ideas for how this might further develop.
  • Making these conversations public, such as on the NDSA blog: In this case, we could invite further discussion and share the ideas and principles we are working from.
  • 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 Conversation

It is clear that our group is not on the same page for what it is we want to do in and around open source software.

• There were still questions about what our product should be. Do we want to produce guidelines, best practices, a list of considerations for systematic decisions on build, buy, adopt decision around preservation structure infrastructure? Do we want a checklist of a set of questions to ask when making decisions around open source software?
• There were some good questions about scope: Do we want something summarizing common knowledge or something with more in-depth research and analysis? It was suggested that the former is really the only thing that is attainable, but it was also suggested that their may be something between the two.
• There were still some big questions related to the extent to which this should focus soley and directly on OSS vs. other kinds of systems.

After all of these questions the group decided that this needed to go out to a small group of members to hash out and better define and bring back to the group. Trevor volunteered to send a message out to the list to recruit for a small action team which could put together a proposal for how the group can proceed.

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 which will revolve 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