NDSA:Digital video exploration meeting notes

March 10, 2014

Roster

Kate Murray, LC
Barrie Howard, LC
John Spencer, BMS/Chase
Heather Heckman, USC
Linda Tadic, AMPAS
Carl Fleischhauer, LC
Kara Van Malssen, AVPreserve
Karen Cariani, WGBH
Andrea Goethals, Harvard
Winston Atkins, Duke
Paula De Stefano, NYU
Melitte Buchman, NYU
Jesse Johnston, NEH
Josh Sternfeld, NEH

Discussion

Kate Murray provided some background for this exploration: the Standards WG realized a lot of people are working on issues related to born-digital video (BDV). On the first call the participants discovered a need to capture a list questions because there are so many directions to take the exploration. The questions are listed here.

The scope of today's call is to review the questions, and organize or prioritize the list. The group should also consider choosing one or two specific questions to explore in depth, or aggregating sub-sets of questions under categories or themes that would seed a general survey to send out to NDSA members. There was clarification that BDV is not limited by format, e.g., HD or SD, or both. This was addressed because NYU has experienced that digital-deposit video formats are very different from those used for analog migrations. NYU recommended adding a question to address the issue of creating digital masters, and how to educate creators about BDV workflow.

FADGI is looking at workflow issues with its work on MXF. There was consensus that training and workshops are important since they impact processing workflows down the road. The questions were reviewed as a group, with the following additions:

What technical formats are you using for BDV?
With regular depositers, how far back in the chain of creation do you go to address digital video formats?
Since not everyone has direct control, or the opportunity to reach out to the artists to influence file creation, what practices are you using with ingest processing for born-digital video?
- Normalization
- Keeping the original files
- Monitoring
What types of auxiliary files are you keeping along with the content, e.g., stills?
How are you trying to model higher level objects, e.g., a single program spanning four tapes?

WGBH has discovered that the formats they receive is whatever is coming out of a camera. It's not a conscience choice of the creator. One way to manage what you can expect to receive is provide guidance on what kind of camera a creator should use based on the types of files they create.

As a next step, the group decided to:

Group the questions under specific themes or topics, e.g., ingest, file formats, etc.
Identify a survey model and tool, e.g., the storage survey started with a page on the wiki, and the working group first learned where they had consensus where they didn't. Then they created a more formal survey.
Design a simple, one-question, multiple-choice survey, with three-five high-level themes for responders to identify as their top issues for dealing with BDV.
Identify a process for disseminating the survey.
Disseminate a survey to the full NDSA membership

Everyone in this group has some familiarity with BDV, but can we reach the non-experts, who are receiving more video into their workflow? There's a lot of video content out there people are dealing with, which is not part of their preservation programs. Can we just reach out to the NDSA membership via the NDSA-ALL email list? This is a good place to start because the NDSA has a wide range of practioners from novice to expert.

The group completed a preliminary exercise in grouping the questions into themes:

Technical specifications around metadata, file formats, etc.
Reformatting physical media
Workflow, e.g., is your workflow different for access files versus preservation files?
Storage - ready access vs. long-term preservation storage
Tools
Policies, e.g., collection development policies or preservation program priorities
Rights issues, e.g., copyright, licensing, DRM

Action items

Draft notes & upload to the wiki - Barrie Howard (completed)
Group the questions under high-level themes - Andrea Goethals and Kate Murray (completed)
Share survey model developed by AMPAS for The Digital Dilemma 2 - Linda Tadic (completed on 3/10/14 - Thanks Linda!)
Set up another call on 3/31 - Kate Murray (complete)

February 7, 2014

Thanks to all for participating in the digital video brainstorming session on Friday afternoon! We had a great introductory discussion involving NDSA members from The Library of Congress, Harvard, Stanford, NYU, Columbia, University of South Carolina, CalTech, Duke, WGBH, and UCLA/Audiovisual Archive Network. For many of institutions, video is the last big genre of content that isn’t (well) supported in current digital preservation repository and access systems. MOOCs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course), collaborative projects and mass digitization also are areas of special interest. We discussed how we might best collect and compare data – perhaps through case studies (generalized or specific), formal survey, etc. In the end, we decided that we need to better define the questions we wanted to explore.

Our primary action item was to set up a new page on the wiki in order to capture questions and topics related to video to help us narrow our scope. We will have another meeting in a few weeks to discuss how we might organize and address the selected topics in a thoughtful way. We will set up a Doodle poll for the next meeting.

All NDSA Standards members are welcome to submit questions/comments on digital video to the wiki page:

Direct link to page on wiki: http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Digital_video_exploration&osindsawikipdb_session=e242a4804ce795249cac084b5af027e9

You can also get to the page through the main wiki page: http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Standards_and_Best_Practices_Working_Group (scroll down to Digital Video Exploration)