NDSA:April 4, 2011 Standards Working Group Notes and Agenda

Agenda

• Update on the July NDIIPP annual partners’ meeting and how we’re thinking of folding NDSA working groups in (Jimi)

• Update on the progress of action teams (Kate & John, whoever else)

• Discussion of metadata action team's recent meeting. As part of this we'd like to talk about what factors we should consider to help the teams delineate what is and what is not outside the scope of the larger survey. (Mary Vardigan, Jennifer Waxman, Amy Rudersdorf...) This may be folded into the action teams' progress reports cited in the above bullet.

• Parking spot for standards and best practices that don't fit into any of the current action teams (Andrea)

• The start of a list of guidance documents that we might want to consider in-scope for this project. (on the wiki at http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Parking_Spot_for_other_DP-related_Standards_and_Best_Practices) (Andrea)

• the start of a list of existing inventories of dp-related standards, etc. that we can mine for references but also could inform our project (see http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Sources_of_Information_about_DP_Standards_and_Best_Practices) (Andrea)

• Any other business

WebEx Recording

https://issevents.webex.com/issevents/lsr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=45405947&rKey=8cfe37a67b4d8ee1

Notes

NDSA Standards Working Group Monthly WebEx

April 4, 2011

In attendance:

Andrea Goethals

Jimi Jones (note taker)

Kate Murray

Amy Rudersdorf

Mary Vardigan

Karen Cariani

John Spencer

(If attended this meeting and you don’t see your name above then please add it)

The first bit of business was to talk about an idea that the 2011 NDIIPP Partners’ Meeting planning committee has been kicking around. The meeting will be in July – exact dates will be forthcoming. The planning committee talked a couple weeks ago about how the NDSA should be a prominent part of the meeting. We figure there’s going to be a lot of NDIIPP people who are also NDSA people. We want to make time in the meeting for the NDSA working groups to actually “do” something instead of just reporting out about our activities. One idea we had is for the working groups to have open meetings – open to all participants at the meeting, NDSA or non-NDSA – with specific tasks that the working groups want to get done during the meeting. This would likely involve the working groups reporting to the planning committee about what they want to do at the meeting and the committee then trying to pair the groups up with appropriate NDIIPP participants. Or it could happen organically during the meeting in July.

I gave an example that, I hope, will illustrate the above. One of the important components in our standards survey is the design of the final product. We know we want a Web resource but we haven’t talked much about what that resource will look like, what its functionality will be and so on. One thing we could work on at the July NDIIPP meeting is the design, layout and functionality of the survey. We could engage with some of the meeting participants who are not in our NDSA working group and try to hammer out some of these details.

Note that the above example I gave is meant to be a straw man. We can refine and proceed with that idea if that’s what the working group decides to do or we can do something else. I would like to see us actually DO something and PRODUCE something at the end of the meeting rather than just report-outs of our progress, even if what we produce is a clear plan of attack for something. Andrea mentioned that if we decide to go with my idea we’d need to come armed with use cases to inform and guide our work. (Regardless, it’s clear we’ll have to put use cases together once we start talking about what the survey resource will look like.)

Over the next month we should all give thought to what we’d like to tackle at the July meeting. At our May working group meeting I would like to decide on what we’re going to do at the July meeting and figure out what we’d need to come to the meeting armed with.

Next we heard from Kate Murray and John Spencer. They are both on the AV file formats action team and have started entering standards related to digital audio in the survey. Kate pointed out some minor idiosyncrasies in the template. She said that it is ultimately perfectly good for data collection but not good for output. In other words it works fine but is a bit inelegant to search through.

Kate recommended that the “alias” field be used for associated standard numbers. She also recommended that the “ISBN” field could be renamed so that any kind of standard number can go into that field.

The upshot of Kate and John’s discussion was that the template action team has done a great job providing us with a survey template that works very well.

Mary Vardigan then gave us a report about the March meeting of the preservation metadata standards action team (their meeting notes can be found on this wiki). Much of their conversation focused on scoping their portion of the survey. In other words, when is something a “standard” and when is it a “best practice”?

Ultimately we decided that it might be most logical to have each section of the survey (AV file formats, metadata standards, etc etc) have its own description statement saying why the action team for that section chose the standards it chose. In other words, each action team could scope their work themselves instead of the entire working group trying to scope the survey en masse.

A question arose about if we have a plan for the long-term maintenance of the survey. This is something we know we will have to treat, but as yet we have no plan for who will maintain the survey into the future and how they will do it. That could be something we discuss at the NDIIPP meeting in July. I wondered if perhaps we can a tip from Wikipedia and “turn it loose” and encourage the greater preservation community maintain it in perpetuity. John thought perhaps our survey could be underwritten by the private sector in some way. We should not overlook the potential for help from the private sector.

Andrea took the helm and showed us a couple pages she’s put on our wiki on the Categories and Action Teams page. The first is dedicated to resources we can mine for info for the survey. She also showed us the “parking lot” area she put up on the wiki. She has put some things that may or may not fit into the survey and should be reviewed by appropriate action teams. Each action team should regularly consult both of these wiki pages as they do their work and should also feel free to add to them.

Andrea highlighted the section in the parking lot page for “guidance documents” which are a kind of gray area – these aren’t quite standards, but are still probably worthy of inclusion in the survey. Kate mentioned that we may need to add the characterization of “guidance document” to the survey template to help us capture these.

Last we heard from Karen Cariani, who is also a member of the Infrastructure working group. At our last meeting we thought it might be advantageous to interface with that working group for the infrastructure-related entries in our survey. Karen, as part of the most recent Infrastructure group monthly meeting, unpacked our survey work for them. Karen reported to us that the Infrastructure group is interested in helping out but would like for us to engage them again further down the road as our survey work is more fully formed.