NDSA:Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Return to Meeting Schedules, Minutes and Agendas

Roster

Trevor Owens, Library of Congress
Karen Cariani, WGBH
Leah Prescott, Georgetown University Law Center
Joe Pawletko, New York University
Emily Shaw, University of Iowa
Cal Lee, UNC
Kevin McCarthy, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Martin Kong, Chicago State University
Carol Kussmann, University of Minnesota Libraries

Agenda

Update on Fixity Check Fact Sheet
Update on open source digital preservation tools project
Update on NDSA Storage Survey report
Next call, presentation from Olive Archive Emulation/virtualization project
Future directions: Migration Project

Action Items

Further final review of the Fixity Check document before Trevor submits it to the Coordinating Committee to sign off on as a NDSA publication - Trevor
Work up short thematic blog post resulting from the themes in the OSS interviews
Contact Trevor (trow@loc.gov) if you would like to be involved in the new Migration "Packing List" project idea.

Discussion

Update on Fixity Check Fact Sheet

In discussion of the Fixity Check fact sheet, Emily and Carol both noted that the draft had already been useful in educating/informing their colleagues, so that's a success. Otherwise, there wasn't much of any further issues raised. The only substantive revision to the document since the public draft is some refinement of issues relating to how file systems like ZFS incorporate checking at fixed intervals. If there are any further tweaks or issues related to the document send them on to Trevor.

Update on open source digital preservation tools project

There wasn't really considerable interest in doing too much work here. So the work done already can be easily turned into a short blog post that brings together some of the thematic points in the interviews and draws further attention to them.

Update on NDSA Storage Survey report

There is a little bit of final follow up to check some issues with the response rate but the group will begin interpreting the data in the next few weeks with the intention of producing a report on it thereafter. Several have already volunteered to draft the report, but anyone else interested should email Trevor to be added to the group.

Future directions: Migration Project

Karen asked the group what they would like to tackle as a next project and suggested the idea of a kind of check list, or packing list if you will, for migration. Switching from one system to another system. Or best practices. (Hardware, software, storage systems from soup to nuts.) Kevin brought up examples of issues in the work of the National Archives migrating presidential records from one stack of technologies to another and another case, moving images from census to another. ARMA document guidance on migration. Kinda like a packing list. When you are about to undergo a migration you should do these things. How to make sure you aren’t losing any data and metadata. Issues in access and rendering. Not a focus on normalization, that would be out of scope, but just focusing on moving fixed digital materials and metadata forward. (Sub group, Kevin McCarthy signed on, Karen joins in, Trevor). Trevor will check with the standards group for further participation. Cal noted that there is a "ISO 13008:2012 – Information and documentation – Digital records conversion and migration process (PDF)" which might be useful for consulting. All together a group was formed, with Trevor, Karen, Kevin and Leah to work up an initial take on what something like this might look like to share back with the group on a future call.

Next call, presentation from Olive Archive Emulation/virtualization project

Title: The Olive Executable Archive Date: June 24th, 2:00 EST Join the NDSA Infrastructure working group for a presentation and discussion of the Olive Archive project from Dan Ryan the project's curator of executable content. Briefly, from their website: "Olive is a collaborative project seeking to establish a robust ecosystem for long-term preservation of software, games, and other executable content. Born at Carnegie Mellon University, Olive addresses the current gap in preservation technology by providing a curated environment for the preservation and distribution of executable content." https://olivearchive.org/ Dan will give an overview of the project, the technologies it uses, and lead a discussion of it's next steps.