NDSA:Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Infrastructure Working Group Call, March 27, 2012, 2pm-3pm

Attending

• Andrea Goethels, Harvard University
• Dean Farrell, UNC
• Elizabeth Perks, Utah State Archives
• Jefferson Bailey, Library of Congress
• John Nicholes, University of Minnisota
• John Spenser, BMS Chase
• Mark Evans, Tessalla
• Martin Halbert UNT
• Micah Altman, MIT
• Priscilla Caplan, FCLA
• Shawn Nicholson, MSU
• Trevor Owens, Library of Congress

Action Items

1. Compression Discussion: Mark, Micah, and Jefferson each volunteered to continue the discussion on the email list. We will continue this line of conversation on the list for another two weeks.
2. Next Discussion List topic: Mark and Micah volunteered to kick off a conversation on the list about making decisions on what number of copies to keep and bit integrity check frequency.
3. Open Source project: Linda, Aaron, and Karen each contacted me or responded over the list to express their interest. Trevor will contact them to see about working on shaping up this project idea into a one page project charter/plan that spells out the goal, approach and a timeline.
4. New Project Ideas: Trevor volunteered to post these ideas to the ideascale page in the next week. Everyone is explicitly encouraged to propose ideas on ideascale for additional projects.
5. NDSA summer mtg Infrastructure WG presentation: A sub group will meet to discuss what this presentation might look like. Karen to set up doodle poll for a separate call.

Discussion Notes

1. Compression Discussion: We started by continuing our discussion of compression. It was clear from our conversation that we haven’t exhausted the compression discussion. One of the key points of discussion was how much should one worry about the proprietary nature of various approaches to disk compression. In particular, the group was interested in how much one needs to worry about proprietary disk compression approaches if the storage is online and accessible. The group is interested in thinking of ways to surface some of the points of consideration and issues in these discussions. It was suggested that the NDSA summer meeting might be a good target to try and hit for having brief reports on the discussions to invite further input.
2. Last Change for the Open Source Project: Linda, Aaron, and Karen each expressed interest in the project on the list before the call. Trevor will contact them to see about working on shaping up this project idea into a one page project charter/plan that spells out the goal, approach and a timeline.
3. Next project? Back to the Ideascale drawing board? We briefly revisited our original brainstorming on the NDSA IdeaScale page. We have actually touched on most of these original ideas. Now is a great time to seed this page with new ideas for projects that we think could benefit our organizations. It would be ideal if everyone, particularly those who have not yet been particularly active in the work of the group could make suggestions or comment on suggestions. The group suggested a few ideas on the call, including an interest in tools that support automatic classification of content that could serve to support appraisal roles, and an interest in inviting speakers to present on new technologies which the group would write up short pieces about and potentially share though the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Blog. Trevor volunteered to post these ideas to the ideascale page in the next week but the group wants to encourage others to share ideas as well. http://ndsa.ideascale.com/a/ideafactory.do?id=4760&mode=recent&discussionFilter=byids&discussionID=11334
4. Input for the NDSA Joint Leadership Meeting The NDSA Coordinating Committee and the Working group chairs are meeting at the end of this week. Are there any things that we would like to hear from the coordinating committee on? We spent a bit of time discussing which of our projects the group found the most useful.
   1. One member noted that they thought the presentations and briefings on various cloud projects we initially engaged in were particularly useful.
   2. One member found the recent encryption discussion to be useful. In particular, that this kind of discussion and knowledge sharing fit a time frame and scope that worked particularly well.
   3. Several members felt that the survey project was particularly useful. It is noteworthy that the standards group is using the storage survey to model their own survey project.