NDSA:Meeting Minutes 03-26-12

NDSA Innovation Working Group Call: March 26, 2012, 10am-11am

In attendance

• Jane Mandelbaum, Library of Congress
• Trevor Owens, Library of Congress
• Jefferson Bailey, Library of Congress
• Micah Altman, MIT
• Gary Wright, Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Overview

This was a quick call that primarily updated group members on the status of ongoing activities, especially the Insights Interview series, the Innovation Awards program, and the upcoming NDSA Coordinating Committee Meeting. We also discussed transitioning to a fixed schedule monthly call (for example, the last Monday of every month) to facilitate planning for participation.

Monthly Calls

We will send a Doodle poll to solicit opinion on having a regular call time, for instance the last Monday of every month. This can allow people to better fit the call into their schedule.

Interviews

• The Innovation Interview series is a popular blog feature, so we should continue to solicit interviews and think of interesting, novel perspectives and projects that we can bring into the conversation on digital preservation.
• We have a 4 interviews completed and in the blog queue. New ideas for additional interviews?
  • Mike Edson speaking on libraries and cultural heritage (Trevor)
  • Denver Public Library project to solicit, display, & preserve user contributions for a "community archive" (Jefferson)
  • Astronomical data management (Jane)
  • Millenniata M-Disc (Gary) -- Jane will check rules for interview with vendors; see action item below
  • Project using the body as a data transfer point (Jane)

Innovation Awards

• The awards were announced (http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/03/announcing-the-ndsa-innovation-awards/)
• The announcement has been posted to a number of listservs, but we need to continue our promotional and outreach efforts to ensure as many nominations as possible. Ideas?
  • NDSA: continue push to get NDSA members to submit nominations and promote awards program
  • LOD-LAM community
  • MLIS programs (to encourage student submissions)
  • H-Net & H-Grad lists
  • Digital History, Public History, and Digital Humanities outlets
  • Any other relevant listservs or outlets?

Kickstarter Project

• The Outreach Working Group started a Kickstarter page (http://www.kickstarter.com/pages/NDSA)
• This is a good opportunity for collaboration that had its origins in the Innovation WG session at the partners meeting in the summer. Ideas include maybe scoping our "bit preservation challenge" to be a Kickstarter-funded project. Also, there is interesting overlap with the Innovation Awards as projects could potentially be featured there for additional/continued funding.

NDSA Coordinating Committee

• The NDSA Coordinating Committee meets later this week (March 29 & 30).
• We will report on our activities.
• This may also be a good opportunity to discuss the various proposals for a "Preservation Challenge" and see if there is interest in this project among other Working Groups.
• We also hope to hear of what has been particularly successful in other Working Groups as far as projects, experiences, and what our individual and shared goals are for the near future.
• Results and feedback from the meeting will be shared with all group members.

Action Items

• Interviewers who voice ideas should follow-up with their potential interview subject. Ping Jefferson or Trevor if you need sample questions or an interview framework. We usually either research the topic or work off of a subject's recent paper or presentation.
• Jefferson will send a Doodle poll to see the preferred time for a regularly-scheduled monthly call.
• Co-chairs will ensure we report out about the outcomes of the Coordinating Committee meeting.
• Jane has an action item to check on practices for interviews with commercial entities such as Millenniata (suggested by Gary).