2012: Looking Forward to the Work Ahead

By mgschultz|Professional|Be the first to comment!

So, 2011 is winding down and I thought I would take some time out on this last day of the year to plot a road-map for some of the work I’ll be doing in 2012 on behalf of Educopia and as Program Manager for MetaArchive Cooperative.

First thing on my desk when I step back in on January 3rd is to wrap up the final reporting to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). MetaArchive has been administering a Sustainable Preservation grant since 2008, whereby we have been formalizing the administrative apparatus between MetaArchive and Educopia as its non-profit host organization. We’ve also been engaging in strengthening MetaArchive’s trustworthy preservation capacity by delivering on recommendations from a 2009 TRAC self-audit and putting in place one component that many sites often shy away from–namely a Contingency Plan. We’ve worked closely with our membership and the Chronopolis team to test and develop the necessary transfer mechanisms between our two heterogeneous environments (we run LOCKSS, they run iRODS)–should the need ever arise. The project has met with great success across the board, and I’ll look forward to covering all of our progress and milestones in our final report.

Last quarter of 2011 we also kicked-off two new grant projects. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has provided Educopia and MetaArchive with the necessary funding for two years to study, with our project partners, the preservation needs of digital newspapers (both digitized and born-digital). This study, dubbed Chronicles in Preservation is primarily geared toward studying the state of digital newspapers that fall outside of the parameters for the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), but is also inclusive of that well-prepared set of content. We are also working under a University of North Texas Libraries-administered grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to study the lifecycle curation needs of electronic theses & dissertations (ETDs). In addition to general project management, I have a couple of key deliverables to knock out during the first couple of weeks of the New Year–namely the completion of a standards gap analysis for the NEH project, and a micro-services requirements overview for the IMLS project.

But the most exciting set of work that I’ll be picking up with in the first couple of weeks of 2012 is working with our individual members to review the health and status of their collections in our network. The Cooperative prides itself on being a collaborative endeavor, and a transparent one at that. The central staff worked very hard over the last quarter of 2011 to do a thorough review of the collections in our network, and report back out to our members. I’ll look forward to collaboratively auditing their collections with them to their expectations and our policies. We’ll also work closely through our Content Committee and our Preservation Committee to jointly finalize the edits to our core governance and policy documents that were reviewed at this year’s annual Steering Committee meeting held in conjunction with CNI.

And if those things are not enough to keep me busy on the front-end of the year, there are a few other interesting projects that I will be devoting attention to intermittently as time permits. The first of which is facilitating monthly-calls for the RESTful Bag Server group. You can read some of my previous posts on that set of development work here and here. But you would probably be just as well off visiting our github site here. Feel free to join the Digital Curation Group and look for call announcements and agendas. Another endeavor involves a National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA)-driven effort to enlist the digital preservation community in developing a framework for applying standards like OAIS and auditing tools like the proposed ISO 16363 to the distributed digital preservation environment. The scope and overview of that proposed set of work can be linked to from the NDSA Standards Group wiki page here (you must be a member of NDSA or request permission). Finally, I had the privilege to become a trainee this past October under the Library of Congress-sponsored Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Program. This program gave me the skills and resources needed to go out into my region and engage cultural heritage institutions and research centers of all shapes and sizes, providing them with some of the fundamentals of digital preservation as a means of standardizing concepts and practices. I’ll be putting out feelers both locally and more broadly within my region first-thing in January; will aim to hold a workshop of some scale come early spring.

Well, that should keep me busy into the first part of the year. I’m looking forward to working with all others involved. Happy New Year everybody!