NDSA:Innovation Working Group

Statement of Purpose

By encouraging and sharing innovative methods of digital preservation practices and technologies, we plan to distribute, document, and share emerging concepts, while conducting and guiding research and development with engaged partners to find solutions where none exist.

Current Action Team Projects

Annual Recognition Awards

This team is planning the first slate of annual awards, to be given out at next years July meeting. The group will pick the specific set of awards we want to accept nominations for, decide on how we want to do nominations, and presumably, make the decisions on who will win the first set of awards. For more information, see this blog post on the awards project.

Insights Interview series for Digital Preservation Blog

Group members conduct interviews with individuals inside and outside of the organizations and specialties currently participating in the NDSA. Examples of potential related fields include but are not limited to, digital archeology/forensics, virtualization of programming environments, material sciences, and humanities computing. The interviews are published to the Library of Congress’ digital preservation blog. For an example of what this group does, see the first interview with David Rosenthal.

NDSA Presence on Google Summer of Code:

Google summer of code connects student developers with mentor’s at organizations to write code for various open source software projects. This action team is focused on planning a coordinated presence for NDSA member open source software projects on Google’s Summer of Code project.

Storage Ping Technical Challenge:

The idea behind this project is to plan a ping service that could check on many of the features of preservation storage systems. This could include, average latency, bit integrity, up time for files, etc. The group will work on putting together a plan for how to implement this and the kinds of light weight polices that would need to be put in place to run such a technical benchmark.

See NDSA:Future projects for areas for the group to explore at a later date.

Current Members

A list of current members is posted here: NDSA:Innovation Working Group Members.

Meeting Schedule and Minutes

Action Team Kick Off: March 8, 2010 from 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM ET - NDSA:Meeting Minutes 03-8-11

Working Group Charter Discussion: November 5, 2010 from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM ET - NDSA:Meeting Minutes 12-7-10

Practices

• Listserv: for ongoing communication
• Web site: for public dissemination of group’s work
• Monthly conference call: for coordinating ongoing activities
• Wiki: our common work space

Participation

Participation in the Innovation Working Group is restricted to NDSA member organizations. Contact co-chairs Micah Beck or Jane Mandelbaum to join the working group.

Participants in the working group will participate in working group phone calls, undertake tasks to help the working group accomplish goals, and be active in helping accomplish the goals of the working group.

Action Teams may be created around specific tasks. These Action Teams may be self organized by members of the working group and may include non-NDSA members as the work requires. Non-NDSA members will not be participants in the Working Group but may contribute to the activities of any Action Team. Action Teams will update the Working Group about their accomplishments and progress.