NDSA:Jan 8 2014 Minutes
Attendees (41)
- Abbie Grotke
- Erin Engle
- Erik Rau
- Bob Spangler
- Sarah Koonts
- Glen McAninch
- Cathy Hartman
- Barrie Howard
- Deborah Rossum
- Sarah Grinn
- Gail Truman
- Amy Kirchhoff
- Michelle Paolillo
- Butch Lazochack
- Midge Coates
- Gail McMillan
- Christie Moffatt
- Rachel Howard
- Kristine Hanna
- Aaishe Hakal
- Abby Rumsey
- James Simon
- Mark Myers
- Martha Berninger
- Dina Sokolova
- Michael Stoller
- Felicity Dykas
- Kelly Chatain
- Barbara (?)
- David Miller
- Mark Evans
- Ann Jenks
- Abbigail Swanton
- Jane Zhang
- John Voss
- Butch Lazorchak
- Meg Phillips
- Mike Quinn
- Beth Cron
- Mitch Brodsky
- Linda Reib
Minutes
Erin offered to take minutes. Thanks Erin!
A recording of this session is available here: https://issevents.webex.com/issevents/lsr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=63872777&rKey=4700ace2786dcb9c
Abbie gave a welcome. This call was a second in a series of discussions about the National Agenda Digital Content Areas. This call will focus on Electronic Records to help raise awareness about this content area and learn about the particular issues related to the preservation and management of erecords.
Erik Rau, Hagley (speaking about Business Records)
No slides
Erik opened with a discussion about making the case for preserving business records, noting that David Kirsch at UMD has worked in this area. Electronic business records should be preserved because:
- they are ephemerial and important to discuss that our collective lives are spent involved with commercial entities over time
- they provide businesses with lessons learned and provide the public with oversight as to what has happened / why certain decisions have been made by companies and their management
- companies should want to preserve their legacies
Erik mentioned specific challenges Hagley face preserving business records:
- Appraisal of records – they find the documents that discuss operations and strategic decision making important. They have also found that strategic decision making is recorded, digitally, in email, digital documents. These are harder to preserve.
- Given the current litigation climate, companies have less interest in preserving those records and they are more reticent about providing decision making to Hagley. More often then not, PR records are readily provided for deposit.
- It is challenging to get companies to understand why is it worth their while to preserve their own legacy – getting them to see preservation as an asset, not a liability.
- Copyright and permission – many Hagley collections are on deposit and still owned by active companies. Some collections include oral histories. Hagley digitizes paper documents, but they are also now collecting more born-digital content of failed dot com companies from California. Hagley policy is 25 year embargo. No documents currently available before 1989. This has given them some time to deal with digital preservation issues.
Related to NDSA Agenda priorities, Hagley is interested in:
- Interoperability and portability
- Digital forensics – many dot com records in obsolete format
- Content integrity
- Cost and audit modeling
- Preservation and scale, particularly interacting with corporate donors.
Q&A
Erik was asked to talk more about the 25 year embargo period for records. He noted that the 25 year embargo relates to all records – digitized and born-digital. Documents produced for public consumption (PR records, for example) are exempt. Those documents circulated for internal company use are under the embargo. Many firms don’t want to give up their records permanently. Deposit agreements are long-standing practice.
How mature are Hagley’s preservation processes? What’s in place?
In 2012, Hagley hired Tessela and uses Preservica. Currently, they are developing workflows and practices.
Sarah Koonts, State Archivist for North Carolina (giving an overview of COSA's SERI)
http://www.statearchivists.org/seri/
(no slides)
COSA’s mission is to strengthen state and territorial archives in their work to preserve America’s historical records. It is a very data driven organization and surveys state archival programs frequently.
SERI program started in July 2011 with a survey of existing electronic records programs asking states to self-identify their activity. Out of the survey, COSA developed an action plan around 4 planks, each directed by a subcommittee: 1) education and training; 2) awareness of electronic records; 3) governance issues within states; and 4) best practices, tools, and implementation strategies. Self-Assessments completed by every state and territory in May-June 2012 helped them determine the current status of their electronic records programs and identify where they should focus their attention to continue to move forward. The self-assessment tool is based on the Digital Preservation Capability Maturity Model developed by Charles Dollar and Lori Ashley.
Education Subcommittee:
- Received IMLS grant
- In 2013, COSA held introductory and advanced electronic records institute and invited states who scored low on the self-assessment. This is where priorities of the NDSA agenda really resonated, dealing with policies, metatdata standards, etc.
- In 2014, the advanced instituties will be held based on geographic location, not based on states who are less or more advanced in erecords preservation. This will help with collaboration among states locally.
Best practices and tools subcommittee is working on a portal to find information on best preservation and management of electronic records. Portal will go live later this year.
Tools and Education groups will be conducting monthly webinars on electronic records preservation and management topics.
Governance Group Subcommittee is currently reaching out to related interest groups to work on access and advocacy issues.
Advocacy and Awareness Subcomittee is working on raising awareness for access issues and promoting electronic records day (10/10)
(no questions directly following her presentation)
Glen McAninch, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives (experiences at their institution with State gov records)
Glen's presentation is here: File:KDLA electronic records NDSA overview 2015.pdf
Q&A
How difficult does KDLA find the metadata issues re: matching up or more fundamental? Glen noted that they are working through the issues. The problems are the implementation of a common metatdata standard (DC) by various software and interoperability between products (DSpace vs Preservica). KDLA does mapping and works w/ Tessella on the data elements.
Are they using Preservica for born-digital records? Glen noted they are uploading records not put in DSpace, and they are currently working on a transfer mechanism between the two products. There are challenges with geospatial records and video files.
Bob Spangler, NARA (speaking about NARA's Current e-records initiatives)
(no slides, but the following text was provided by Bob and enhanced by notetakers):
National Archives: Research Services – DC District – IT Specialists Group (RD-I) - group is starting up in March and consists of 3 IT staff, 2 archivists. This is an implementation group, not a policy or research group. They won't be developing guidance, but will feed back to those who do.
Organizational Placement: *Agency Services (records management, agency schedules, etc) *Research Services (transfer, processing, accessioning, etc) *Information Services (enterprise system support) *Office of Innovation (public access, social media)
Current initiatives:
- Development of processing tools
- Integrated accessioning toolkit
- Written by computer science undergraduates
- Open source philosophy
- Analysis of Archivematica for Congressional Records (which are handled differently than ERA - their born digital records are stored separately)
- Alternate methods of access for structured data – data.gov, Socrata. Other alternatives
- IT-centric processing support
- Eventual idea of “IT Archivist” - they are looking at the mix of skillsets needed to do work going forward. It may be worthwhile to bring in those who have computer science backgrounds and to train them into archivists rather than the other way around.
- Pre-accessioning via “data-at-rest” - this is for content that is scheduled but it not yet time for NARA to take control. NARA would like to take "intellectual" control of them so the data is not impossible to deal with by the time it gets to them. So while they are not transferred yet, they are controlled by NARA.
- Technical addenda for format guidance - They are working on updating their format guidance for agencies, who still need more guidance on how to prepare exports and send. This will give NARA more predictable sets of records.
Q&A
Catholic University is has many students without IT backgrounds. What kind of things should we be teaching our future librarians? Bob stressed importance of having a mix of skills, for instance 85% archivist, 15% IT to work with electronic records.
Are you integrating ACE auditing tools in Archivematica? Bob says they think they will.
The next CWG meeting will be member presentations and general updates, and will be Feb 5 at 11am ET. The Next National Agenda session will be March 5 at the same time, and will be on Moving Image and Recorded Sound.