NDSA:November 26, 2012 Standards Working Group Notes
WebEx meeting notes, November 26, 2012
Attending: Andrea Goethals, Kate Zwaard (note taker), Meg Philips, Kate Murray, Nancy McGovern, John Spencer, Mary Vardigan, Carol Kussman, Dina Sokolova, Emily Shaw, Aarom Trehub, Butch Lazorchak, Carl Fleishhauer, Amy Kirchhoff (Apologies if I have left anyone out, please feel free to add your name.)
Opening
2 new members introduced themselves:
- Kate Zwaard, Library of Congress
- Nancy McGovern, MIT Libraries
Staffing Survey
- A reminder to please contribute to the lessons learned while they're still fresh
- How do we expand participation, especially to commercial institutions and institutions with large content collections
- The instructions for only one respondent per institution may have made it difficult for large institutions to participate (i.e., who is responsible for responding)
- Perhaps solicit individually. Get the list of the NDSA representative for each institution, enlist their help.
- Please consider joining the publish team (a great way to get a publication on your resume) or the archive team
WikiProject
- Andrea reported that Columbia is continuing to make progress on restructuring and rewriting the Digital Preservation article.
New Projects Brainstorming
- Certifications
- Would like to hear from people involved in peer review.
- NCPSR involved in the Data Seal of Approval, a community model that involves peer review
- Standards
- Looking at which standards are being adopted. Trending up or trending down.
- Concern about survey fatigue
- Could be a qualitative look, perhaps in-group. Look to the Storage Survey as a model
- Possible questions: what standards are you using and why? Why other standards did you consider? What standards did you migrate from?
- Terms of Service
- Human-readable explanation of preservation commitment
- Also terms of service repositories enter into for hosted services
- File formats, Specifically PDF/A-3
- Follow-up from the Signal Blog post and related discussion.
- Stated need for a document that describes flavors of PDFs broadly and the strengths and weaknesses of each sub category. Information earlier in the lifecycle would be helpful for folks.
- Use case: a deposit wrapping everything in PDF/A, including audio and video, which is preventing the repository (NARA) from doing file more identification
- Harvard has "opaque objects" to support the submission of any file format, which can sometimes tempt people away from more fully supported file formats
- Portico would rather unknown files rather than those same files wrapped in a PDF, even if they can't identify them.
- Digital Preservation Profiles, similar to the Data Curation Profiles
- Levels of preservation and stages of development
- Meg and Jefferson Bailey submitted a proposal to SAA comparing the NDSA levels of preservation to other electronic records preservation models with levels
- A document that describes different models with levels of preservation, comparing similarities and analyzing gaps
- Lots of Interest in and who volunteered to write it up
- PDF/A-3 guidelines, Kate Murray
- Levels of preservation guidelines, Meg Phillips
- Certifications, Nancy McGovern and Mary Vardigan
Wiki Project
- Andrea discussed at a Coordinating Committee call the possibility that we might want help from others in advancing this project to the stage where we could begin publicizing it. (This was based on concern that Columbia is currently shouldering most of the work of this project and we don't want to take advantage of their good will).
- Stephen suggested that they continue to work on the revamping of the digital preservation article until December when we can take a vision check-in. He thinks we should wait to publicize it broader until the new article structure is in place. They will throw up a flare when they need help with particular things. They are OK for now on finding sources to cite. They would like the group's help reviewing the work as they complete it. One thing we will need to consider at some point is how much we want to try to keep to our outlined strategy and how much we are willing to let others morph it independently of our project.
Closing
- Next call the week of December 17th