2011-07-25: NDSA/NDIIPP Partner Meetup 2011 Trip Report

WS-DL’s Comtributions to the NDSA/NDIPP Meetup
Mat Kelly presented the Mozilla Firefox add-on Archive Facebook to a breakout group of presentations specifically targeting web archiving. The redesigned and re-architected add-on allows a user to archive the content of his/her Facebook account with the result being truly WYSIWYG versus Facebook’s native offerings of a content dump.
Vivens Ndatinya showed the workings of a tool he is currently building with his presentation, “Creating Persistent Links to YouTube Music Videos”. The software serves as a medium between a user and YouTube where, if a music video has been deleted or removed, the proxy will search for a comparable or official substitute and seamlessly forward the user to the resource for which he/she was looking.
Vivens Ndatinya showed the workings of a tool he is currently building with his presentation, “Creating Persistent Links to YouTube Music Videos”. The software serves as a medium between a user and YouTube where, if a music video has been deleted or removed, the proxy will search for a comparable or official substitute and seamlessly forward the user to the resource for which he/she was looking.
Michael Nelson presented "How Much of the Web is Archived?", which was also presented at JCDL 2011. By examining links on DMOZ, delicious, bit.ly and search engines and cross-referencing the links with various archives, they were able to establish the criteria for likelihood of archival rate and conclude the amount of the web that is archived with, "It depends on the source of the URIs".
The Speakers


In 1993 he created one of the first websites but neglected to archive it. “Things that turn out to be historic”, he stated, “aren’t deemed to be historical at the time” – a theme that reverberated through many other presentations.
His second past failure of preservation was in 1998 when he attended the inaugural Open Source Summit (link?), where the term “Open Source” was officially born. Learning from his 1993 failure, he diligently built an archive and linked to all of the relevant content but neglected to deep link the archiving, which meant all of the information that was coupled with his coverage was no longer available at time of access.
O’Reilly rhetorically queried the audience, “What kind of tools do we need in the everyday practice of the digital world to encourage presentation?” He stated that we have to consider the widely divergent scenarios if we are to archive effectively. He reiterated that the tools we have should be adapted to assure that it is more likely that archived would survive when things went awry. “What matters?”, Tim stated, again referencing his two failures and answering his own question. He emphasized that our current perspective of what matters is temporally subjective and that we are likely neglecting to archive collections we now consider trivial.
To close up, Tim emphasized that there should be an exception in copyright for the sake of archiving so that our past will be preserved.

Kickstarter takes only a very small (5% of the raised funds) to remain sustainable but only receives these if the project gets funded. With this, Kickstarter and the projects both grow. “One day”, Yancey said, “we’ll hopefully be a cultural institution”.

- Extra-terrestrial Space Auditor is a concept best depicted by an extraterrestrial that examines an organization, blind to its current workings, and provokes the organization to do a self-analysis as to whether it is performing as it should in terms of business practices, HR, etc having been potentially skewed in operation by the baggage of the last epoch.
- On Ramp and Loading Docks encourages the mindset that successful preservation is not about building infrastructure but rather creating movement.
- Edge to Core suggests that the best work is done on the fringes of an institution where subject matter experts exist. “An organization”, Michael said, “should develop a process that brings in and bootstraps these experts so their ideas can scale.”
- Self Awareness about organization change patterns states that there are predictable miscommunications and general crankiness in an organization between innovators and managements.
- Focus on the mission was Michael’s observation that of the 80 to 90 organization that he had spoken to in the last few years, the ones that were not suffering their pursuit of worth know the outcomes they want in society.

With Aaron being the last presenter for the day, Abby Rumsey moderated a panel discussion/Q&A with all of the Day One speakers., first hoping to address Martha's question, "How do we make it work?" She first asked Aaron how to connect demand of archiving with the supply of skill and if there is something that needs to be in-place to make these connections easier. He replied with the need to communicate the success of individual cases to much broader audience, convey the lessons learned and establish best practices for performing such an archiving session. He admitted that it's difficult "to make archiving sexy" but popularized projects such as History Pin get people thinking and both energize and popularize the task of archiving.
Tim O'Reilly expounded on Aaron's reply, referencing a collection of railway edition books from the 1880s that were bounded by people that found the works both valuable and beautiful. "When some individual finds something that would otherwise be disposable and finds it beautiful and a keepsake", Tim said, "that's a wonderful impulse for preservation". He continued, "When we allow things to be reused by individuals, it really appeals to value of fair use." He went on to speak about how intellectual property fights against preservation and what we can do to preserve things of value is to give them more freedom.
Abby then questioned Michael Edson about how his approach of Edge-to-Core has had an impact on The Smithsonian. Michael gave the example of how the Smithsonian handled the inception of the world-wide web with no business process in-place. "Because the institution took a decentralized approach to managing content and ideas", he said, "there was no existing infrastructure to make order out of the web. It's been a series of opportunistic efforts to pick the pieces of the low hanging fruit and bring them to the center of the organization to achieve scalability and a greater impact."
Yancey was then asked, "How do you get something where the connections are so profoundly personal into something that really scale to the level we think about with digital preservation?", citing Wikipedia's scaling issues. Yancey alluded to Wikipedia's moderation challenges in terms of curation with, "What happened if I'm a guy that knows a lot about a topic you're concerned with archiving and I decide to reach out and tell you everything I know and all of the ways to be wrong? What do I get to contribute? Do I have any voice whatsoever?" Aaron replied with, "Exactly, that's a tremendous challenge and whether 80% of time you're right, 20% of time you could be fundamentally, deeply, troublingly wrong."
The Q&A was followed up with a reception accompanied with 30-or-so poster displays. Of particular interest to the WS-DL members was the Ace Audit Manager and Integrity Management System, an integrity auditing system for archives, which would prove useful in both the Memento and Archive Facebook projects. This closed out day one.




Subsequent to Ben's presentation, the crowd broke up into three groups for workshops. The three topics of the workshops were "And the winner is..: How does a community recognize achievement?", "Tales from the crypt: What are the emerging practices of large scale storage" and "Special Interest Session: Web Archiving: Pecha Kucha and discussion of emerging topics in Web archiving". Because Vivens and Mat presented at the latter of the three, the WS-DL members attended and participated in the third session.



Following Michele was another breakout session of concurrent workshops with each having the topics of "Tools at risk", "I can haz standardz" and "Developing cutting-edge internship programs in digital preservation: What are the essential elements?". The WS-DL group attended "I can haz standarz", which disappointingly was more about the inability of the non-technical in building a tool for data management rather than about the standards themselves. As the group were all of technical mind, this was clearly the wrong workshop of the three to attend.
After another short break was a third set of concurrent workshops: "Digital preservation in a box: What are the key resources for digital preservation and education and outreach?", "Slaying the dragons: What is at risk and how do we rescue it?" and "The Challenge challenge: What are ways we can spark digital preservation innovation". The WS-DL group attended the third of the three. There, the attendees were broken into groups with each group being tasked to discuss a single topic in-depth with varying concerns in each group. Unlike the previous workshop, one topic was specifically technical - that of investigating how one assures archive integrity from a host and how to go about performing an audit on the collections stored. The WS-DL group along with Michelle Gallinger (@mgallinger), Professor Micah Beck (website), Mike Smorul (@msmorul) and a couple others devised the Storage Ping concept, which would require those that host collections to enable a client induced check on the server's collection integrity.

After David, Cal Lee (website) of UNC Chapel Hill analyzed the four NDIIPP State projects:
- Persistent Digital Archives and Library System (PeDALS) by Arizona
- A Model Technological and Social Architecture for the Preservation of State Government Digital Information by Minnesota Historical Society
- Geomap (GIS Data headed by North Carolina for Center Geographic Information and Analysis)
- Multi-state Preservation Consortium by Washington State Archives
The questions he asked about each projects included:
- What are the main factors that drove the project in the first place?
- What brought these about?
- Who was involved and why?
- What were the activities they engaged in before this?

Following Cal was Robert Horton from the Minnesota Historical Society who presented his slide-less report of his NDIIPP-sponsored project. Cal spoke of a soon-to-be enacted uniform law for the preservation and authentication and access to electronic legislative records. The legislation will define the required usage of digital Signatures to sign all legislative content online.
Peter Krogh (@peterkrogh) of the American Society of Media Photographers spoke next with, "Extending the reach of www.dpBestflow.org". Peter had been investigating means of collaboration and methods to get people to archive by conveying the task of archiving in a way that will appeal to the would-be archivist.


"Our charge was to do roughly three things", Fran enumerated:
- Assemble a representative group of experts with broad perspective and influence.
- Look at the problem space: how can we structure it and understand us in a way that helps us take action.
- Come up with actionable recommendations.
The BRTF created a report with it recommendations.

She said that their mission was very practical: they needed to ingest game bits into institutional repositories and provide packaging standards for doing that. Other examples of virtual worlds she mentioned were investigated were Spacewar, Adventure (interactive fiction) and Mystery House (interactive fiction) among others.
In Closing
Neither of the WS-DL student presenters had presented at a meetup/conference of this caliber before, which made the experience more than worthwhile. Much was learned about the various efforts of the archiving community and WS-DL's projects gained exposure. Further, we were made aware of others' efforts and found some resources that we hope to integrate into our research in the near future.
— Mat Kelly
2020-01-23 Edit: Updated SlideShare embed code -- MLN
thanks
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