NDSA:Outreach Meeting Minutes 01-09-12

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Monday January 9, 2012, 3:00 p.m. EDT

Agenda

• Announcements
• Reminder: Follow http://twitter.com/ndsa2 and use the hashtag #NDSA2 in their tweets.
• Brief updates on the current status of the work of the “Stories” and the “Digital Preservation in a Box” Action teams.
• Other business

Participants

Guest Scribe: Sarah Rhodes

Jane Zhang, Vickie Allen, Kim Schroeder, Carol Minton Morris, Sarah Rhodes, Dever Powell, Deborah Rossum, Abbie Grotke, Blane Dessy, Katherine Skinner, Linda Reib

Meeting Notes

Action Team Updates:

Storytellers

Carol Minton Morris pointed participants to the Storytellers meeting minutes from Dec. 15, 2011, available at http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Meeting_Minutes_12-15-11, which outlines the Storytellers’ initiative to create a video production group.

Kim Shroeder has secured the use of 2-3 groups of students/academic video production departments to facilitate producing short videos. The group discussed possible examples of 3- to 5-minute videos to share with these student video production groups as inspiration, including the following:

• Why Digital Preservation is Important for You (Library of Congress): http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/multimedia/videos/personalarchiving.html
• Archipel videos (featured in The Signal): http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/01/new-videos-from-archipel-steal-the-show/
• Digiman (determined by the group to be somewhat over-the-top for our purposes, but worth exploring in terms of an animated, humorous approach): http://www.youtube.com/user/wepreserve/videos

It was also recommended that summaries of stories submitted so far via the “story gathering” Google submission form could be provided for inspiration. Kim will draft specifications for this academic video production initiative, which will be shared with the group for comment. Following consultation with the video producers, the Storytellers group will also develop a schedule/project management spreadsheet to guide the video production initiative.

Digital Preservation in a Box

Jane Zhang announced that her digital curation class at Catholic University’s SLIS begins on Jan. 10, 2012; Butch Lazorchak and Dever Powell will visit the class, provide background on digital preservation activities at the Library of Congress and National Library of Medicine, and point students to the Digital Preservation in a Box site. Jane’s students will use the site’s resources for a major outreach activity project. The current box materials will be refined over time based on student feedback.

Jane has agreed to share the course syllabus with the Outreach WG. All WG members are encouraged to participate in Jane’s class, and Dever expressed an interest in coordinating student-practitioner coffee-break meetings to discuss course readings and job-related issues.

Butch announced that the public Box instance provided E-Z Photo Scan is live, http://ndsa.ezphotoscanning.net/omeka/home. The site, which is still undergoing customization, consists of three components:

• The Omeka front-end;
• The wiki ported from NDSA, allowing for any user to set up an account and contribute; and
• A digital preservation forum, http://ndsa.ezphotoscanning.net/forum/, allowing for the NDSA to actively answer digital preservation questions posed by the public. (Outreach WG members are asked to encourage forum use through active contribution/posting.)

WG members participating in this meeting and e-mail exchanges expressed reservations about the name, “Digital Preservation in a Box,” as it may be misleading; the “box” contains resources, but not actual software. Dever Powell and Liz Bishoff recommended that Jane’s digital curation students be recruited to devise a new name for the resource. Jane will work with Dever and Butch to solicit students’ suggestions toward the end of the semester, after they have had some experience and exposure to the content.

Organizational Outreach Updates

Carol recommended that organization outreach activities proceed by developing a unified ask/offer message and assigning liaisons from the working group to contact targeted organizations on behalf of NDSA.

The following liaison-organization pairs were assigned:

• SAA/Helen Tibbo
• MLA/Dever Powell
• AALL/Sarah Rhodes
• SLA/Blane Dessy.

(Also documented on the wiki page at http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Organizational_Outreach)

The WG is presently seeking a member to act as liaison to ALA; Blane recommended that several WG members work together to determine how to engage ALA.

Liaisons (along with other, junior-level staff members at their respective workplaces, if possible) are asked to explore their assigned organizations’ strategic plans for references to digital preservation to determine opportunities for engagement.

The working group also explored the “ask” and “offer,” and is looking to standardize the NDSA’s approach, which will be similar yet tailored for each organization. The group discussed the NDSA “seal of approval” (display of NDSA logo for affiliated organizations), and the challenge of a establishing “low barrier” to encourage organizational participation while also ensuring that NDSA affiliation remains meaningful. Butch suggested that one possible desired “ask” or outcome would be for affiliated organizations to establish a dedicated digital stewardship working group or other initiative to raise awareness of this issue among its members.

Blane offered that the prestige of partnering with the Library of Congress and a statutorily-created national digital preservation program may provide sufficient incentive to targeted organizations. He also suggested a tiered approach for encouraging digital stewardship among targeted organizations: begin by asking organizations to begin thinking about digital preservation, then provide a standard written paragraph to incorporate into policy/planning documents, and finally provide more comprehensive “certification.”

The WG determined to proceed by drafting a preliminary one-page document, based on discussions during this meeting and content posted to the wiki, outlining ask/offer (obligations/incentives) for organizational NDSA affiliation. Sarah Rhodes will draft the document, which will be circulated for comment. With this document drafted, the group will then explore creating supporting materials for organization outreach, such as a slide deck or video, similar to the funding pitch videos available via Kickstarter, http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/2011-the-videos.

Action Items

• Draft specifications for video production initiative (Kim Shroeder)
• Contact Jane if you have an interest in contributing to her digital curation class, and Dever if you would like to participate in a student-practitioner coffee break (all)
• Register and contribute to the Digital Preservation in a Box forum, http://ndsa.ezphotoscanning.net/forum/ (all)
• Post digital curation course syllabus (Jane Zhang)
• Review organizations’ strategic plans for references to digital preservation to determine opportunities for engagement (liaisons)
• Contribute additional target organizations, “asks,” and “offers” to wiki (all)
• Draft ask/offer document (Sarah Rhodes)