Reading Group Notes 12-2014

Delve & Anderson, Part 2 (12-09):

• Initial thoughts
• Did the reading help to clarify any fuzzy concepts?
• Did anything you read make you think about your particular job/task in this area in a different way?
  • Ideas/concepts to include in the training you do for new employees in your department, or students?
• Was there anything you felt was not feasible or actionable on our campus, or in your context, and if so, why?
• What were some of the stand-out actionable pieces of the text? How do you think they fit in to the broader plan for the environmental scan?
• If you were to review this content through the lens of one of your client constituencies, (Ex. faculty), which concepts do you think were underspecified and require clarification or translation into your context of creation?
• Ch.8 - Standards enforced during creation, first step to preservation/preservation begins with the spec?
• Recommendation that preservation/description be budgeted in - another thing to front-load in the conversation with faculty and staff
• Software citation as a preservation technique
• Research reuse as a form of preservation
• Knowing "what", "how", and "who" (who knows what and how)
• Don't assume that 3rd party vendor products are better documented for preservation
• Funding and time budgeted specifically for preservation. 

Ch.5

• Where are we at with reuse - not only what processes do we have in place for ensuring reuse but how much a part of the practice of archaeology/architecture/art is data reuse?
• File formats should be part of the conversation with faculty and staff? What formats do they currently consider to be "preservation formats"?
• Understanding "designated user community" - what does it mean for us and where does it fit in to the CDO conversation/scan?
• Key areas: data creation and reuse, selection and retention, formats, hardware/software
• One key finding from the survey was proprietary software - software preservation is emphasized as tantamount to digital collection preservation in Part 3
• VALUE - the crux of the CDO scan - What do interviewees perceive of as valuable, how is their value measured - couching preservation in those terms. Work/study observation as a third method for the research scan
• How many of the metadata elements recommended for visualizations & simulations are currently being captured by faculty in the AAA

First impressions:

• Using the language of the text and the way of framing the problem to 'present preservation'
• Adam's data group is about long-term preservation and reuse in archaeology. A lot of folks are having trouble thinking about this eventhough/but/simoultaneously Federal regulations from grant-funding agencies requiring data-management plans are 
• CDO scan - work study observation is important. Adam and the Swenson coin photogrammetry, at the Briscoe for example. "Cradle to grave" information gathering about the contexts of preprocessing, creation, postprocessing, storage, display
• In archaeology, software citation is not used as a preservation technique - software citation is only included in methodological papers
• What does the "average" data management plan look like?
• Content analysis on data management plans - want all funding agencies that award to AAA represented in the sample
• Waiting until the end to start the storage and access conversation is still the predominant practice even if people are aware of preservation challenges
• Data management plan section is about giving the funding agency ideas for preservation storage; considered sufficient to negotiate the cost of preservation storage with TiDAR or OpenContext and use that as a line item? We need some way to make accurate projections about the long-term (read: 5yrs) storage costs of complex digital objects? Can we create a calculator using business analytics methods?
• No project can pay ongoing, unforeseen costs (so upfront pricing schema are the best we've got)
• Under-specified metadata adds costs to long-term preservation
• The notion of "target-data types" for the university
• SDX(CRM) - ontology for archeology - Dublin Core schema used to implement the ontology
• object v. informational values, differences in value statement for different departments

Delve & Anderson, Part 3 & 4 (12-16):

Ch.9

• software preservation is data preservation - thinking about ways we can combine efforts on campus
  • Software collection at iSchool
  • Software library at Briscoe
  • Quinn's Craigslist for hardware
  • Destruction stream through the iSchool helpdesk
  • Work with ISO on the central licensing repository
  • Leveraging our size at the university to negotiate terms of user for older products with companies

Mark Phillips:

• The only institutional models that work have massive institutional buy-in, how do we address that at UT regardless of the fact that we are bigger and we have many more organizational units
• We have a window of opportunity for putting together an argument for support but it is also a window of uncertainty
• The key might be to demonstrate a need and then to get as far along as you can without funding and then present funding opportunities that are available 
• We could leverage this period of transition in administration
• Dr. Clarke, who is in the Art History Department is in the book and correct - the Ontopolis project as a digital project cannot be supported 
  • he put together all the documentation from past restoration work
  • they want to create this new digital project
  • we have this challenge of relying on people's personal interest and free time in order to get these projects done
  • you can't hinge the sustainability of a project on one person (we could come up with more than one case study or example on campus of this happening if that it helpful)
  • the problem is not serving the 3D model but the interaction with the database is too complicated, the resolution needed to do scholarly work is too high to do it that way anyway
• London Charter, can't walk it back, we have to go back and do everything from scratch. 
• Michigan got a big NEH grant for 3D publishing - I wonder if they are working with anyone at the Michigan iSchool to walk through a data preservation process as part of this - publishing for the long-term a complex digital model (Gabii Goes Digital  - find out if they are working with the iSchool)
  • complicated digital infrastructure is a loser for publishers so the e-book initiative is tough
  • ongoing costs of infrastructure and hosting doesn't match up with a revenue model
• Thinking about comparing ourselves with our peer institutions along multiple points, not just looking at preservation but the institutional context 
• Duke, UNT, Stanford - looking at peer institutions
• Poke Christy and Angela about the outcome of the peer review (who did they review, what questions did they ask, etc.) 

• With the ADS, they seem like they have their Duke's in a row with the OAI-compliance
• Guides to Good Practice
• We need to ask questions in  way that gets us closer to the foundational information: what's in scope, how would you define your community, whose not in your community/domain, what are the boundaries of your domain

• Katie's friend has worked for Center for Sustainable Design and he suggested that the CDOG Environmental Scan needs branding and who we are
• More complex than managing relationships: documentation, 3D model, elements in database, transactional data in the database, GIS data - we are talking about stuff where process is an academic product as well as the software 
• Protocols for storing data eventhough we have groups that are paid to create this complex stuff
• Check in with interviewing developers  - what form does the documentation need to be in 

speaking of protocols - perhaps we need to have recommendations as part of an education/outreach program  - we need to interview faculty and development (we should encourage them to include the interview in their data management plan, or interviews at several phases of the project - iterative documentation project...this might be a way to link money to preservation for university administration, better data management plans might mean more grants)

we have to observe their current practices in order to figure out how to introduce these new practices of preservation and description and data organization 

preservation intervention points

• build preservation into the training program - methods and theory class
• office of sponsored projects: they have the chance to say, your application looks great, but you need to go talk to these people about your data management plan
• where is the data management plan represented in the budget
• the overhead for storage should be something that the university provides from the percentage of the grant that they take

the CDOG needs an executive sponsor

faculty and development need advice about data management plans

data management plans