NDSA:Future projects

Prototype implementations and procedures.

This suggestion is a reaction to the idea that the other working groups will be working on services and infrastructure that are at least "pre-production", meaning that they have some expected level of service. Ideas that are not yet at the stage of stability that these working groups require would go on within the Innovation Working Group, and so would be clearly identified as falling into a different category. Prototype implementations might attract funding from agencies such as the NSF or from industry or from participating organizations. Such activities might be completely contained within the NDSA or they might be a collaboration with other organizations.

Experimentation and analysis.

There are a number of experiments that could shed light on the processes of Data Stewardship and measurements and analyses that could be applied to the body of data currently being preserved in a variety of contexts, from the academic and governmental to the industrial and consumer. For example, there is little public information about failure statistics of disk drives. Industry efforts at evaluation tend to be closely held for reasons of commercial sensitivity. A detailed long-term study of disks in controlled environments would be one way to pursue this information. Another way would be to catalog, monitor and tabulate the track record of disks deployed in the field.

Working beyond digital preservation

This could mean collaborating with fields that may not currently be considered part of digital preservation (such as Digital Archeology/Forensics) to apply their techniques. Some areas, such as virtualization of programming environments, may be of fundamental importance to digital preservation but are thought of as part of programming languages and operating systems. Other areas, such as material sciences, have a direct impact on what properties of physical objects are measured and recorded during digitization.