NDSA:Content WG December 8, 2010 Meeting Minutes

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NDSA Content Meeting Minutes

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Attendees (14):

• Alaska State Library - Daniel Cornwall - daniel.cornwall@ALASKA.GOV
• California State Library - Kris Ogilvie - kogilvie@LIBRARY.CA.GOV
• Internet Archive - Kristine Hanna - kristine@ARCHIVE.ORG
• Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives – Glen McAninch - Glen.McAninch@ky.gov
• Library of Congress - Abbie Grotke - abgr@LOC.GOV
• Maryland State Archives – Timothy D. Baker – timb@MDSA.NET
• Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes - Michele Timmons - michele.timmons@REVISOR.MN.GOV
• New York University - Michael Stoller - Michael.stoller@NYU.EDU
• SCOLA - Deborah Rossum - drossum@SCOLA.ORG
• University of Louisville - Rachel Howard - rachel.howard@LOUISVILLE.EDU
• University of Maryland - Jennie Knies levjen@UMD.EDU
• University of Maryland – Mathew Kirschenbaum mkirschenbaum@GMAIL.COM
• University of Michigan – Data-PASS - John Weise - jweise@UMICH.EDU
• University of North Texas - Cathy Hartman - cathy.hartman@UNT.EDU

Approval of Previous Minutes

Minutes from the previous meeting were approved.

Finalize Charter

Statement of Purpose: A few changes were suggested/discussed: “Culturally” was removed from the statement, and an additional line about enhancing awareness about existing preservation activities will be added to align this with our scope of work. Practices: All fine. Abbie gave an update on the wiki (not up yet, but hopefully soon). Twitter was brought up – should we be doing outreach via twitter about our activities? The Outreach Working Group has talked about doing outreach for all but Twitter hasn’t come up. Abbie will ask the NDSA folks at LC if it’s been talked about. Participation: All fine. Cathy and Abbie reported that they’d gotten word that some non-NDSA-member people could be invited to help participate in an Action Team if the Working Group would like to include others who haven’t joined. They would be encouraged to explore membership (if appropriate) but don’t have to. They would not be official Working Group members.

Current Scope of Work: Scope statements were revised after discussion. Cathy will distribute a new version with all edits, but here is some of the discussion:

For (A) (about the registry of content) will remove the phrase “and others” – the group worried that for now, in this first year, it might be best to limit our scope to NDSA members so that we can start small, lay a foundation, to see what we can accomplish.

We discussed whether we needed to define the criteria for being in the registry. NLA’s tiered approach was mentioned as something to look at – they have three levels of commitment to preservation, essentially:

• linking to
• preserving the bits
• preserving the original formats

The institutions self-evaluate and are making a statement about their commitment to preservation.

One idea is that the registry be very high-level, not very granular. Link from high-level entries to other sites that maintain more details about specific items.

One participant felt the reason for doing (A) wasn’t as clear as (B). There were strong opinions that it was important to raise awareness about what is being preserved, for everyone to know what everyone else is doing. We decided to revise the Statement of Purpose to include something about (A); we realized this was missing.

Abbie talked a little about NDIIPP’s desire for a registry. She mentioned the launch of a new Recollection interface to NDIIPP collections that was posted last week. She’ll send a link to the listserv. It could be that we work to enhance that or build on what’s been done there for our purposes.

For (B) (about the clearinghouse) we decide to leave “trusted” in – that would also help us limit our scope. There were questions about the type of content we were talking about – and whether we needed another work area to help us define significant content. Do we leave it to partners to define? Some commented that it felt too vague and we needed to specify more what we mean.

We explored the idea of a work area such as “Investigating guidelines for significant content” – but some felt uncomfortable with the idea of trying to influence members or to make commentary on existing collection policies. Another proposal was to instead describe it as “define what we mean by at-risk content”, which would allow us to identify at-risk content and selection criteria for that.

Ultimately, the group decided to revise the bullets slightly under B. Once that was done, everyone was fine with moving forward with edits as discussed. Current Membership

Abbie and Cathy have received a few updates to the membership list. Let us know if there are other changes to make.

Meeting Schedule

Meeting schedule was approved. Next meeting is January 5, 2011, 11am-12pm ET.

Organizing for our work areas

We talked about how to organize ourselves and decided to form two smaller groups for (A) and (B) activities. From the call participants, a number of folks expressed interest in one or the other.

(A) Group Volunteers (so far):

• Abbie
• Rachel
• Daniel
• Kris
• Jennie (with Pat’s okay)

(B) Group Volunteers (so far): 

• Kristine (lead)
• Michael
• Glen
• Matt
• Deborah

A suggestion was that Group B start with determining what specific types of content or collections are at risk.

Group A needs a leader still. We will post to the listserv and invite others who could not make the call to sign up for a group if they are able to help get these groups started. We will try to have people sign up by the next call and then we will talk at the next meeting about how to move forward.

Cathy and Abbie will be attending the NDSA Steering Group meeting next week in DC and will report out on our Working Group activities so far, and will share the charter.

-End-