NDSA:Meeting Minutes July 21, 2014

NDSA CWG Meeting July 21, 2014 at Library of Congress

Attendees (10)

• Abbie Grotke
• Christie Moffatt
• Cathy Hartman
• Joshua Sternfeld
• Gail Truman
• Bradley Daigle
• Kat Bell
• Stacey Erdman
• Edward McCain
• Chad Garrett

NDSA Web Archiving Survey

Christie and Abbie shared progress/highlights of the Web Archiving Survey. Draft will be distributed to CWG soon. Gail Truman suggested we ask in a future survey how many organizations are using Duracloud.

Research and Development for Digital Cultural Heritage

Gail Truman and Josh Sternfeld noted the challenge of the case study format for the broad range of subjects covered by the Cultural Heritage team, and shared their new approach around research and development. They gave a preview of their Digital Preservation 2014 session “Research and Development for Digital Cultural Heritage: An Open Forum.” For more and to continue the dialog, see this blog post: http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2014/07/research-and-development-for-digital-cultural-heritage-preservation-a-virtual-and-in-person-open-forum/

Content Working Group: Future Work/Meetings

Next steps for case studies

• Case studies have been developed by a few of the content teams, but we need to figure out where to take them next. The CWG can be the glue between case studies and technical implementation.

Building Relationships

• Discussed possible role of CWG in bringing together and facilitating communication between content creators and repositories. CWG could serve as a first line of contact, requiring good social skills and understanding to mediate successfully.
• More content summits like Science and Risk and Preservation.exe and news! Those were NDIIPP meetings, but CWG could think about hosting similar "mini" meetings with content creators, researchers, archivists at NDSA regional meetings, or tied into other conferences.
• Consider development of a Collective Impact strategy.
• "we have a crisis" but we can't handhold all content creators. How do we negotiate relationships? One idea was to work more closely with Standards WG to lower the bar for content creators.
• There are many questions among a lot of stakeholders, and the Content Working Group might have a role in nurturing conversations around these questions.
• Need to articulate benchmarks and forge relationships with stakeholders, build trust. "If you give me your stuff to preserve, I'll do xyz for you." Case studies are a good foundation but we need to do more.

Packaging/sharing information for curators and content creators:

• Kat Bell spoke about her use of tool kits for the dance heritage community (see http://www.danceheritage.org/artisttoolkit.html), and the challenges of talking to content creators about preservation of their born-digital content when there is not a cohesive decision about standards and best practices. She raised the question about whether tools provided to specific communities to help them preserve their own content could be applied more broadly.
• CWG might help pull resources together to support preservation for people/donors who don’t know where to start. Put together packaged guidance that can be modified as needed. These could be around standards/policies, copyright, donor relations, curation tools, cost projections. (Like Personal Digital Archiving but more, and targeted by content type). It was noted that we are often preserving things that haven't been donated, so this will only serve certain needs/audiences.
• Help smaller organizations make things happen (though Digital Preservation Q&A http://qanda.digipres.org/ may serve this purpose to an extent)

Organization/future meetings:

• Make use of Dotmocracy tool http://dotmocracy.org/what_is to identify the most pressing needs of group members?
• Member presentations are great, but time should be devoted to questions that tie back to priorities of the CWG.
• Create a small planning group to identify discussion points for CWG meetings? What topics/themes/issues should we be discussing as a group?

Next Meeting

Due to vacations and since we just met, we'll cancel August meeting and gather again September 3, 2014 at 11am ET.