NDSA:November 18, 2013 Standards and Practices Working Group Notes

"What are you working on" -- Roundtable Discussion

• What are you working on?
• What standards/best practices do you rely on for this work?
• What standards/best practices could you use?
• Where do you go for sanity checks?

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• Kate Zwaard, Library of Congress: I’m working on a few software development projects right now. The one that’s probably the most relevant here is a project I manage to help LC staff accession, preserve, and manage digital collections. We also develop Bagger and the BagIt Library. Aside from the standards and best practices of the software development world (development methodologies, code conventions, etc), the best practices we are interested in are related to preservation/administrative metadata, fixity, and provenance. One of our biggest challenges (and joys) comes from serving a diverse user base – our colleagues in the Law Library have different interests, requirements, and needs than our colleagues in the American Folklife Center or in the Manuscript division, for example. For sanity checks, we rely on our colleagues in the NDSA and in the software development community. More about our group here: http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2011/08/yes-the-library-of-congress-develops-lots-of-software-tools/

• Andrea Goethals, Harvard Library: I'm working on:
  • Adding support for video to our preservation repository
    • Using various format sustainability criteria to decide on video formats, could use agreement on video formats and metadata schemas
  • Finishing up a large repository migration - now focused on the metadata migration & user adoption
    • In the software development portion of the project, used best practices on packaging metadata, technical metadata schemas, hooks into format registries
  • A road map for new Digital preservation services
    • Used repository assessment models including the levels of digital preservation
  • NDSR Boston project - testing the residency model piloted by LC & IMLS is Washington DC
    • Using existing curricula like DPOE

For sanity I turn to the digital preservation community writ large including the NDSA and the IIPC preservation working group.

• Kate Murray, Library of Congress: I'm working on:
  • documenting case histories about working with born digital video (through the FADGI AV Working Group). We hope this eventually extends to recommended practices for file creation
  • FADGI is also about to publish a matrix comparing codecs and wrappers for reformatted video
  • I'm also working on documenting email formats for the Sustainability of Digital Formats website

• Leah Prescott and Carolyn Campbell - Georgetown University Law Library
  • We are just at the beginning of implementing a production-level digitization program so our standards and practices are primarily centered around that activity - making sure that we are following best practices and primarily using the FADGI guidelines.
  • We are also in the process of vetting Digital Asset Management systems (along with main campus) and have started discussing preservation requirements in conjunction with that (although the system itself may not be a preservation environment)
  • Will soon be implementing a BagIt process along with METS wrapper to create a basic preservation file structure on a server - and implementing BagIt validation on a periodic basis.