Minutes of the CJH/Metro born-digital media transfer working group, 2/28/14

Present: Tracey Beck (Leo Baeck Institute Library); Chris Bentley (Leo Baeck Institute Archives); Sarah Haug (Guggenheim Museum Archives); Miriam Haier (Center for Jewish History); Christine McEvilly (American Jewish Historical Society); Natalie Milbrodt (Queens Library); Henry Raine (New-York Historical Society); Jefferson Bailey (METRO); Kevin Schlottmann (Center for Jewish History).

By design the initial meeting of this Delmas Foundation-supported working group meeting was informal, to allow the participants a broad discussion of the group's activities.

Introduction

The basics of the group were presented by Miriam, Kevin, and Jefferson. Miriam and Kevin described the origins of CJH’s participation in the project, which stemmed from a small grant from the Delmas Foundation to support scholarly working groups. It was decided that one of these groups would focus on library/archives issues, especially practices around born-digital materials and storage media within archives and special collection. This aligned with a METRO pilot project to test the feasibility of METRO offering at-cost digital migration services to members. Jefferson gave background on the METRO project, especially its origins from discussions of NYC-area archivists about a collaborative forensics/migration and media archaeology lab and how this was a small pilot project to explore digital migration (and potentially other) services around digital collections.The OCLC report "Swatting the Long Tailof Digital Media: A Call for Collaboration" by Ricky Erway was provided to attendees, as it provides a good discussion of the potential of shared digital migration services< The group's overall planned activity:

"Test and refine workflows, contracts, and deliverables associated with a service model for legacy digital storage media migration services provided by METRO. In addition, explore internal institutional processes and requirements for inventorying these types of materials, appraising and selecting them for transfer, utilizing and contracting with anexternal service for transfer services, and how the contents of this media are returned to institutions and reintegrated into collections.Working group participants will share their experiences, outcomes, and relevant associated documentation in a public form."

The intent of the group is to focus on the practical, logistical issues and outcomes involved with this process, to test real-world workflows and contractual agreements, and to document all steps for publication and for use by the community.

Member introductions

Members introduced themselves and their institutions, and gave basic overview of how their institution's materials fit into this project:

  • AJHS - UJA collection contains floppies from the 1980s-1990s and some hard drives. The content may contain proprietary personal or financial information.
  • LBI - will survey collection for materials and is largely interested in the preservation and access questions.
  • QL -digitization, archival collections, lots of a/v and digital phone photos. They have donor agreements for many of the donated materials, but will need to explore questions of storage and inventory media types
  • Guggenheim -has a planning grant for a digital repository; has drawers of disks and other institutional materials that would be access restricted but could be migrated.
  • NYHS -has materials in the institutional archive; interested in issues around email; has a 9/11 collection that is mostly digital and is on a dedicated, but not functioning, piece of hardware; has material that is related to LC’s American Memory collection that is no longer supported. Old websites, etc.

Specifics surrounding that activity were discussed:

  • METRO is hoping for around 5-10 items per member, ideally of various media types from across the group. Jefferson noted that born-digital is anything that is on endangered (not necessarily just obsolete) media. This could include digitized oral histories on CD-Rs, for example, or other more common optical media types.
  • METRO's projectgoals: closely track hardware, labor, and consultative services for cost and labor estimates; identify potential issues in contracting, transfer services, possible or desired additional transfer-related services (such as metadata, content analysis, normalization, etc); determine processes for return of digital materials to counterparties; and explore additional ancillary services can Metro provide, such as redundant storage.
  • Both Christine and Sarah mentioned that they would need initial access to materials on media at basic level, to determine whether they were in scope and justified further processing. A tiered implementation (initial access / more detailed forensic processing) would be worth discussing further.
  • Access to the transferred materials, once they are returned to the providers and (hypothetically) reintegrated into the collection, although not directly part of this working group, was discussed. Institutions, at the minimum, should have some plans for storage and management of the material once it is returned to them. Perhaps patron/use access issues could form the basis of a second working group.

Tasks for the next meeting

  • For providers: Survey and materials for inclusion: Conduct a full or partial survey of born-digital or digitized materials on storage media in your institutions with the goal of identifying appropriate materials for inclusion in this group. Jefferson noted that the survey process and related decision-making should be documented. What did the survey of your holdings reveal? What difficulties did you have in surveying materials? How did you evaluate and select these items for inclusion in the project?
  • For providers:How does your institution handle sending out materials for digitization/microfilming/transfer/conservation? Consider questions of confidentiality, vendor agreements, deaccession, processes and guidelines of appraisal, the duplicative nature of some content on storage media.
  • For providers: Ponder delivery expectations. Consider what you want back from METRO. See Q2 in the rough schedule on the following page, and note that the OCLC report has a "deliverables" section. What does your institution need? What can it handle? What needs to be covered in transfer agreements?
  • For METRO: Work on drafting transfer agreements as well as related documentation explaining the processes and potential deliverables.
  • All: Ponder potential means of documenting and sharing the group’s work – wiki, publications, special events, conference presentations, etc.

Rough Agenda for the next meeting

Outcomes from the above tasks will be shared before the meeting and the meeting will provide a forum for their discussion. Jefferson/Kevin will send around additional materials soon on these topics beforehand.

Next meeting

May 8 was mentioned as a potential date. Kevin will follow up and find a date that works for everyone.
Transfer of born-digital media working group (Tentative agenda as of 2/28/14)

Q1: Initial meeting @CJH, 2/28, 11am (1 hour plus lunch)

  1. Introduction to project (KS and JB)
  2. Participant introductions and expectations
  3. Discussion of agenda, next steps

Remainder of Q1, via email and shared documentation: Begin discussion of Q2 points, and work in particular on transfer agreements

Q2: Meeting April 30 or May 8

  1. Discuss institutional expectations for the transfer service
  • Discuss level of deliverable: Low-level (disk image or LDI, metadata, photo of media)? Very high-level (detailed format characterization and validation, extensive metadata, DFXML, personally-identifiable information screening, potential format migrations)?
  • Address how to handle PII, encrypted information, viruses
  • Discuss actual delivery and transfer mechanisms
  • How to track costs, staff-time, etc.
  • Whether additional preservation or storage services are needed
  1. Draft transfer agreements, addressing above as well as confidentiality, security, liability issues
  2. Discuss other necessary/desired documentation
  3. Discuss survey and selection of media for transfer (low-risk content)

Remainder of Q2 via email and shared documentation: Conduct survey and selection of media, review and finalize documentation and expectations

Q3: Meeting (@ METRO?): July 14

  1. Discuss workflows for born-digital material to be delivered from METRO
  2. Discuss workflows developed for born-digital material
  3. Potentially provide media to METRO for transfer

Remainder of Q3 via email and shared documentation: Answer questions that arise during transfer; begin test workflows using the data provided by METRO

Q4: Meeting in October

Catch up, wrap up, begin to write up experiences for publication or presentation, e.g. at the Metro annual conference

BORN-DIGITAL MEDIA WORKING GROUP

The Center for Jewish History and METRO are pleased to announce a library-archives working group, supported by the Delmas Foundation. The group will spend a year focusing on the issues surrounding contemporary records of social, cultural, and historical importance that are born digital, i.e. created on computers and stored on external and internal digital media storage devices such as floppy and zip disks, optical media, and hard drives. Accessing, managing, and preserving the records on these objects poses a significant challenge to many archives and special collections, especially small and medium sized institutions without the staff or resources to undertake digital acquisition and preservation projects. In addition, the comparatively short lifespan of digital storage media often necessitates active conservation and migration actions before policies, infrastructure, or workflows are in place. These hurdles have the potential to discourage institutions from collecting born-digital materials, thereby jeopardizing the overall collection and preservation of contemporary archival materials.

This working group will serve as a pilot project with a number of content-contributing partners will help establish the feasibility of a broader implementation, identify partner expectations, help determine scope of work, explore contract agreements, and refine workflows and deliverables.

The members of this working group will provide legacy digital storage media to METRO, which as part of an existing pilot project will transfer the data from the storage media. Group members will then test and refine workflows around these digital materials, and share their experiences in a public form.

Requirements for institutional members: Legacy digital storage media that can be transferred by METRO; attendance at quarterly meetings; regular communication with working group members; commitment of institution to share lessons learned.