NDSA:October 20, 2014 Standards and Practices Working Group Notes

NDSA Standards and Practices 10/20/14

• Recording from the call: https://locosi.adobeconnect.com/p3z92ibxb6z/
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Participants: Abbie Grotke Alex Duryee Andrea Goethals Carol Kussman Crystal Sanchez Erin Engels Felicity Dykas Jenny Mullins John Spencer Kate Murray Linda Tadic Lisa Snider Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig Mariella Sproano Matt Schultz Meg Phillips Melitter Buchman Michelle Paolillo Michelle Ucheck Midge Coates Morgan Oscar Morel Rebecca Fraimow Taylor McBride Vika Zafrin Winston Atkins

New to the call: Rebecca Fraimow, NDSR Boston Resident at WGBH

Project Updates: Erin Engle

Stumbling Block AV Survey update. Decided to do some more data cleanup to see what questions we want to ask and what the next steps will be. Next call will be on Friday, Nov. 7th, 2-3 ET.

Email Interest Group – This is a group that met to talk about challenges in accessioning and preserving email. It’s membership is broader than just NDSA people. They plan to have demo sessions by people who actually have email processing tools between November and January. Send Erin an email (eengle@loc.gov) if you want to join the Email Interest Group listserv.

Presentation 1: John Spencer (see handout)

Summary: M-Disc does provide a durable access copy, but doesn’t know anyone in the digital preservation field who considers M-DISCs as a preservation target format.

Presentation 2: Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, Preserving Content from Authored Video DVDs (see slides)

Questions and Discussion:

Question: a question for John about concerns on hardware, software, and firmware. Is there enough uptake in different communities for optical players to be supported on an ongoing basis?

John: Based on personal observation and customer requests, I think it’s obvious that there won’t be optical media drives for too much longer. The time when each carrier media is dominant is shorter and shorter. Each subsequent generation of technology is shorter. And now, all the content producers are trying to escape the physical (Netflix and Red Box, for example.)

Lynda: agrees with John. There just aren’t enough people out there who care about M-DISC.

Question: In our last call, one of the things Morgan talked about a cheap player that can help with playability. Can you talk about error correction in cheap players?

Morgan: cheap DVD players sometimes have more development effort in the software than in the hardware, which means error correction. Boom box can play back almost anything because they’re expected to be used in hostile environments. Higher quality hardware may reject a wider range of discs.

Question: Archivists have been asked about MDISCs for archival purposes for medium term. What are your opinions?

John: Just seen a handful of clients use it. Error rates are extraordinary. Many discs are no longer playable.

Morgan hasn’t seen clients using for preservation; it is ok for access copies.

Utah has been using MDISK because IT won’t support tape now.

There’s a do-it-yourself attitude in some archives that might use it for a stop gap before they can do something better. John thought this was OK as long as it was considered a stop gap measure. Question: What is gained by preserving ISO disc images in addition to the files extracted from the disc?

Can’t create files that are an exact copy of what’s on the disc and have them playable. The AC3 files are very often transcoded from original files because they have an associated license, original files aren’t playable, but transcoded files aren’t exactly what was on the disc.

MPEG 2 file, still transcoding the audio. Can’t create it exactly as it is on the disc. Keeping the ISO image gives you more options to move forward from the original as well as the transcoded file when the time comes to migrate.

Wrap Up

Next call is November 17 from 1:00 to 2:00.

Agenda will be a report out on the highlights of the many recent conferences (AES, iPres, etc.) In December we may focus on analyzed results of the video survey.