NDSA:Meeting minutes 10/1/14

CWG meeting 10/1/14

Agenda

• Welcome new members
• Examples of past, present, or future work with digital content creators
• Brainstorming session/discussion: 1) What are the top challenges of working with content creators? and 2) What are the ways that the CWG can provide support for working with creators?

Recording

https://locosi.adobeconnect.com/admin/meeting/sco/recordings/local/info?account-id=1271691341&filter-rows=20&filter-start=0&sco-id=1289273142&select-all=true&source=true&tab-id=1271691345

Password: ndsa

Notes

There were no new members on the call.

Web Archiving Survey Report

The report was shared with the NDSA Coordinating Committee 9/25 with a request for comments or concerns by 10/3. Thanks again to CWG members who provided feedback.

Work with content creators

Two CWG members shared their experiences and insights working with the creators of born-digital content:

Nicholas Taylor, Stanford University Libraries: Nicholas shared the guidance developed at Stanford for creators to increase the archivability of their Web content. The guidance includes sections on improving accessibility of content now and for future access; creating Web sites that are more friendly to Web crawlers; ways to describe content to make it more discoverable; and a list of tools and resources to use to help improve archivability. This guidance was developed as part of an outreach effort to the Stanford web master community with a goal to make changes upstream to their Content Management System. This archivability guidance has been communicated to Web managers, IT forums, and presented at an IT unconference. Communication about this guidance is centered on going where the IT professionals are to talk to them about archivability, and to show Web managers the benefits to them for making changes (performance, usability, etc).

Edward McCain, Donald W. Reynolds Institute: Edward spoke about the planned November 10-11 meeting at the Reynolds Institute "Dodging the Memory Hole: Saving Born-digital News Content," (http://rjionline.org/events/memoryhole). The conference is being advertised via the NDSA list, other professional lists, Online News Association (ONA), investigative reporting, and Twitter ONA.

Edward reflected that there has been no coordinated effort to preserve born-digital news content so far, and hopes that getting people together for two days will allow people to work on some of the issues they are most concerned about. The agenda will be created at the meeting. Bringing a diverse group of attendees to the meeting has been a challenge: It has been easier to get people from memory institutions and not so easy to bring journalists.

Edward is looking to get a better plan for increasing the number of organizations that will commit to preservation. Perhaps by partnering news organizations with cultural heritage institutions? Better outreach to news organizations like the American Society of News Editors or the Online News Association? How can we help them preserve their content?

The discussion then led to other work with Content Creators:

Lori Donovan from the Internet Archive mentioned that Archive-It partners sometimes contact creators when they have technical problems crawling external Web sites. Increasingly Web masters are coming back asking how they can make their sites better for crawling.

Another CWG member added that the POWRR Project (Preserving Objects With Restricted Resources) at http://digitalpowrr.niu.edu/ has good takeaways for working with content creators

Challenges, strategies, and resources discussed in the 10/1 meeting: (please do add more if any have been left off!)

• Challenges:
  • Systematic issues in Content Management Systems
  • Creators just want to keep moving; hard to pitch archivability
  • Corporate executives are hard to get involved
• Strategies:
  • Interventions with Content creators to make their content more archivable.
  • Meet content creators where they are
  • Show the benefits to content creator; find avenues of self-interest; for a business, this might be communicating about the value of caring for their assets. Maybe there is a possibility of monetizing back content?
  • For news services that rely on archives, show that archives are a valuable resource of reusable content (Archives as primary content ready for reuse)
  • Create an NDSA-wide set of guidance to use across the membership for work with creators? Perhaps put a call out to NDSA-All to gauge interest?
• Resources:
  • Stanford Digital Library Blog post that introduces the guidance on Web site archivability: https://library.stanford.edu/blogs/digital-library-blog/2014/09/guidance-building-archivable-websites.
  • POWRR Project (Preserving Objects With Restricted Resources) guidance at http://powrr-wiki.lib.niu.edu/index.php/One_Pagers_tailored_to_educate_different_professionals
  • RJI's Journalism Digital News Archive at http://rjionline.org/jdna