NDSA:MetaArchive/GDDP

Notes From the MetaArchive/GDDP Presentation The presentation began with a general description of MetaArchive, its functions, financial commitments of members, and content management.

Responses to Questions

What sort of use cases is your system designed to support? What doesn't this support?

Small museums and libraries and archives who don't have large technical infrastructure.
Orgs that want to join a partnerships for long term sustainability.
Not people who just want to park content somewhere.
Not a secondary back-up more of a process to engage institutions to actively do work of data curation and preservation.
This is not a turn key hosted service.
Supports the storage and retrieval of content for members, not end users. Not an open access network.

If we put data in your system today what systems and processes are in place so that we can get it back 50 years from now? (Take for granted a sophisticated audience that knows about multiple copies etc.)

Presenters suggest model speaks to this issue by striking the right balance between flexible technology without heavy administration.

What resources are required to support a solution implemented in your environment?

Required for support of MetaArchive – support for LOCKS software.
Central cloud infrastructure- key admin.
Having key reliable source of communication. To effectively curate your collection you need to have an understanding of your collection – how to document and store them. Document accumulation of files.
Concrete needs- some level of sys admin expertise, bring up a cache and run it. Tech specs layout what is needed.
Some level of programmer expertise for plug-in development to allow ability to add content.
Some sort of administrator for policy creation and curation.
Partnerships with institutions help build new directions for development.
Submission Information Package necessary for ingest. SIPs require a great deal of work to create for any system. Advantage of MetaArchive is that exactly what the work entails is clearly defined for members.

What infrastructure do you rely on?

A slate of open source tools Linux, Drupal sites, Google code repository, plug-ins in development, TRAC.

What types of materials does your system handle? (documents, audio files, video file, stills, data sets, etc) And give examples of those types in practice

Content needs to be web friendly – crawl-able not necessarily html otherwise agnostic to formats. Will take anything.

How can your system impact digital preservation activities?

Focus on distributed digital preservation.