NDSA:August 17, 2015 Standards and Practices Working Group Notes

Link to Recording

Recording: https://locosi-its.webex.com/locosi-its/lsr.php?RCID=c4d26cf5bc283fe7e1ebcbe851cc7c53

Participants

Adi Alter
Andrea Goethals (notes)
Amy Kirchoff
Ben Peterson
Carol Kussman
Carolyn Cox
Dianne Dietrich
Erin Engle
Euan Cochrane
Felicity Dykas
John Spencer
Kate Murray
Kathleen O'Neill
Kelcy Shepherd
Kevin DeVorsey
Linda Tadic
Martin Kong
Mary Vardigan
Max Eckard
Midge Coates
Nicole Contaxis
Paula DeStefano

Meet Those New to the Group

Kathleen O'Neill (LC)
Martin Kong (Chicago State Univ., in Infrastructure WG)

Announcements and Updates

Video survey update - the blog post should go up in early September. The survey data will be published on the NDSA Dataverse site
There will be an announcement in the next few weeks from the Coordinating Committee on the next NDSA host
Our iPRES poster was accepted. There's still time to join the group working on it (email Erin).
At iPRES there will be a reception hosted by DPN on Wed. evening Nov. 4. At that reception there will be recognition of the NDSA Innovation awardees.

Special Presenter: Euan Cochrane, Digital Preservation Manager at Yale University Libraries

Presentation: "Emulation and Virtualization for Digital Preservation and Access" (See recording for presentation)

Q&A Afterwards:

Q1. I haven't heard of people talk about using emulation for archived email. Have you done any work on this or are you starting to explore it?

A1. I have opened a PST in an emulated Outlook but haven't tried to show it within the context of the whole email account which would be interesting. With email there are some issues - the appraisal of it and the scale of it.

Q2. What are your current biggest challenges in taking this to the next step?

A2. One thing that is needed and being worked on and not necessarily a challenge is adding an authentication layer on top of the EaaS. Some of the biggest challenges are having access to the software and the legal right to use it, and funding the ongoing maintenance of the emulators.

Q3. Are there issues scaling this, for example to all born-digital content?

A3. There are different things that need to scale - one is the technology. A low-hanging fruit would be to set up emulators for all the old word processing formats.

Q4. Can you say more about emulation and redaction? At what scale can you redact (file level, sub-file)?

A5. You can redact at the level of a file by deleting files from a disk and re-saving it as a derivative image. Or you could do something similar by removing parts of a file. One solution might be using BitCurator to filter the content and redact pieces and then using emulation on the redacted version. Derivative images don't take much room.

Wrap-up

The next call is September 21 from 1-2 ET. The agenda may include an update on the new NDSA host. The call will be on the theme of web archiving - recent conferences, current projects, etc. If you would like to be a presenter conteact Andrea, Erin or Kate.