Jan 16, 2015

10am-12pm EST

Local: 416-933-3828
Toll-free: 1-866-602-6845
Conference ID: 5564972

Attendees

Agenda

Discussion Items

TimeItemWhoNotes
5 minCall frequency moving forwardNick Ruest
  • Last year we met quarterly. It will be more difficult to have face-to-face meeting this year because we did not get funding for a summit. How often should we be meeting? Once a month? Is quarterly sufficient?
  • Most agreed that quarterly was sufficient. Agreed to schedule extra meetings if special projects arose. 
10 minDigital Curation Summit DebriefKelli Babcock
  • Nick Ruest thanked Kelli for presenting the report on the community and the Summit at Scholars Portal Day 2014
  • The community acknowledged the excellent work of the Summit organization team: Kelli Babcock, Jenny Jing, Unknown User (saraa), Stephen Marks, and Nick Ruest.
  • The group was interested in hosting a 2015 summit, but Directors feedback was that travel funding would be difficult to come by. Travel is the only significant cost, as space can be booked for free at a Toronto school, and food costs borne by participants. Committee is considering how to facilitate future events remotely (through webinars?)
  • Kelli reported that they received a lot of positive feedback on the event, and that a recording is forthcoming from the U of Toronto AV office.
  • Courtney Matthews asked about the history of this summit. Nick stated that a smaller group had hosted a 2-day Digital Curation 101 workshop, which included community presentations and extensive discussion of the digital curation lifestyle. From this came consensus that there should be an OCUL Community around digital curation (OCUL Communities were first instituted in 2013. See more here.) The Community first officially met last January.
  • Peter Houston indicated that winter weather made traveling difficult for some schools. Could future summits be held at a less-snowy time of year? Group agreed that finding a hosting date was difficult given the number of different conferences and events they took part in. Dan Scott suggested they schedule something around the time of OLITA's Digital Odyssey, happening June 12, 2015. The theme will be something like "open data, open heritage," and so highly applicable to this group. June 8-11 is the Open Repositories conference in Indianapolis, which many from this group will likely be attending.
  • The group agreed to look at dates around Digital Odyssey, and to have May or June in mind for their next in person meeting.
  • Kelli and Jenny volunteered to help plan the event.
15 minRegional Digitization CentresJenny Jing
  • This project started last year June. Worked on a draft for a proposal for a digitization centre for OCUL – Anna St. Onge, Jeremy Heil, Stephen Marks Jenny Jing worked on draft. See draft here.
  • Looked at other digital centres, asked a lot of questions about how they operated.  Sent out questionnaires to OCUL libraries, collected feedback. Developed a list of applications the centres support. Digitial curation requires a complex set of applications, so it’s hard for an individual library to support each application. It’s not just hardware that’s expensive for any one library to buy, but also the number of skill sets needed.  
  • Ten universities responded, including three outside OCUL (McGill, U of A and UBC). Collected staffing info as well. Not a lot of libraries who have budget to support this kind of work (need a whole team). 
  • Please take a look and send feedback. You may also take a look at Access 2014 videos—Jenny cut out short sessions helpful for this proposal.
    • Digital Preservation Working Group from U of A and UBC. Thy have a good service model, which we may be able to follow
    • UBC – central IT vs. library IT (for better sound effect, please use headphones)– need to have local staff, service, budget, otherwise Central IT may try to take over . Will also be presented at Super Conference.  
  • The group expressed their thanks and appreciation to Jenny for doing so much work on this. This is a great foundation for a lot of future planning that could benefit this group, but also OCUL at large. Info will also be good evidence for in-house decision making. 
5 minOLRC updatesNick Ruest
  • All regional nodes have been selected. Steering committee is meeting Monday to discuss price points, and setting up a text mining advisory committee.
  • Issue – storage cost is ongoing. Granting agencies want to see storage costs as a one-time line item in the research budget. What is the cost of storing something forever? California Digital Library has done some research on this, and  Nick will be pushing that discussion forward.
  • Due to a few leaves of absence as well an infrastructure update at U of T, the system is now planned to go live in March.
  • Patricia Moore – Have node locations been announced? Nick - Not publicly. Not clear how public that knowledge will be, as it doesn’t matter where they’re located. There are five, geographically dispersed. 
20 minPlatform updatesJeremy Heil Nick Ruest Jenny Jing Anna St. Onge Nancy Lemay Sarah SimpkinKelli Babcock Leanne Trimble
  • Archivematica (Jeremy) - most recent version 1.3 was released in November. Same version shared at event. Full development roadmap- take a look. Improvements to storage service and to software itself. Many developments sponsored by a number of universities. Working with OCUL [on Dataverse plugin]

  • Fedora (Nick) - In December the production release of 4.0 came out. There is no upgrade path from 3.x to 4.x – it was completely re-written over two years by the community. Universities and cultural institutions developed functional requirements. Huge overhaul, technology is totally different. Now planning for 4.1 release, upgrade path from 3. ‘Upgration’ – looking for pilot institutions to work through what this will look like. York is piloting, will share project plan, documentation with Islandora community as they work through the upgrade process. Will initially work with a few collections that cover many of the generic content models.
  • Islandora (Nick) - 7.x-1.5 release will be ready for April (typically do two releases a year, April and October). Islandora/Fedora 4 release planned as 7.x-2.0
    • Jenny asked - They are currently testing Islandora. Should they wait until it is released with Fedora 4? Nick responded it depends on use case and functional requirements—what do your objects look like? It will probably be awhile before Islandora/Fedora 4 have all the functionality that Islandora/Fedora 3 has.
  • Omeka (Kelli) - Leslie Barnes at U of T is leading Omeka projects. They have development time scheduled, and are planning work on batch uploads from Islandora and improved documentation for Islandora and Omeka (for faculty), to be shared. They are trying to cut down on the number of instances they host: themeing exhibits, while only running one back-end.
    • Anna - York is doing something similar, want to ingest with full metadata into the digital repository, then let faculty 'go nuts' in Omeka. Their main concern is that the metadata moves over properly. They are teaching a graduate seminar in DH and planning to use it as a learning experience as they teach through the workflow.
    • Nancy - U Ottawa has Omeka instances for particular faculty projects, but they are soon going to embedding Omeka work in history classes. They are contemplating get a hosted subscription so that students can just sign up and do whatever they want. Hosted version is less flexible, but possibly most apporpriate for this level of work.
      • Anna - when York profs want a lot of control over their instance they recommend that they subscribe separately.
      • Kelli - Omeka.net somewhat limited. Does not have Neatline plugin capability, for instances. Their development goals are to be able to host multiple sites within one instance.
    • McMaster is starting to work with Omeka, but finding it is very reliant on DublinCore, doesn't work with MODS, which makes extracting metadata from digital repository to put into Omeka difficult, as it only grabs DC data stream.
    • Several group members observed that faculty were deeply invested in having their own instances of Omeka, got worried that other researchers might be able to access their collections, although they all have separate logins.
  • Omeka (Kelli cont) - Have started using AtoM, with the goal of having multiple archives with a different look and feel using the same instance. They are running into a number of issues with this set up; for instance: can’t edit accession numbers. U of T will be doing AtoM development.
    • Jeremy is part of the AtoM steering group, looking at development possibilities and the pooling of resources. He is also sitting on the accession standards group, looking to develop standards to apply to a redevelopment of AtoM's accession module. Kelli has spoken to accession group, will continue conversation. The group is interested in having these discussions on-list.
    • Are contributing institutions also using Archeon (sp?)? They have institutional codes which could act as a quick-fix at the title level. We should all be pushing for the continued development of archival description standards. 
  • DMPTool (Nick) - York is working on creating a one-stop-shop research computing page with info on RDM, Wordpress, high performance computing options. Was going to add a DMPOnline instance, but Barbara McDonald from Brock pointed to the ProjectARC/Portage project as a good option. Nick asked Leanne Trimble to discuss Portage more.
    • Leanne - Scholars Portal ran an instance of DMP Online but found documentation really difficult to follow. The Portage project has decided to work with U of Alberta's instance. Anyone can create an account on that instance, but there's some work that needs to be done to be able to brand your own institution. 
      • Dan asked if the best source of info on Portage so far was Martha Whitehead's presentation to CARL? (nb can't find this, but here is briefing doc). Leanne said that was a good source, but that she would also look at bringing together some previous communication pieces that may be of interest to the committee. The group agreed there was lots of interest in supporting the project. Supporting it through OCUL would also encourage bilingual development.

15 minRoundtableDan Scott Jenny Jing Sarah SimpkinCourtney Matthews Jacqueline Whyte Appleby
  • Dan reported that Laurentian upgraded its ILS over the holidays. They are now deciding whether to upgrade Dspace or move to Islandora
  • Jenny asked if it was true that you needed to upgrade through each release of Dspace (i.e. could not skip ahead several versions at once). Group confirmed that all interim upgrades were required.
  • Sarah asked if those not currently running Islandora were waiting to see about a consortial instance. Nick had pitched this idea at the 2013 summit, or perhaps a consortial instance of Fedora, which schools could run Islandora or Hydra on top of.
  • Jacqueline suggested that this Community would be the best group to put together a proposal for such a service. (For information purposes only, here is a draft of the 2015-2016 budget request business case template. Please confirm with Kathy that this is the latest version if you want to proceed!)
  • Jenny noted that UBC and U of A have been successfully collaborating for a number of years and that while Queens was testing their own instances, they were uncertain about developing the in-house expertise around so many applications. Jenny would be interested in helping to write the proposal Jacqueline mentioned above. Nancy indicated that Ottawa would likely be very interested in contributing to a consortial instances. Courtney stated that Waterloo has a local instance, and are beginning to put in test collections, but that their Dspace is out of date but being updated, and they would benefit from a consortially hosted instances of Islandora.

Action Items

  • Consider dates for spring in-person meeting, perhaps around Digital Odyssey
  • Give Jenny Jing feedback on Regional Digitization Centre report
  • Leanne Trimble will gather communications on Portage that may be of interest to the group
  •  

5 Comments

  1. um, did I screw that up? oops sorry.
    Poor Kelli to be joined at the hip to the likes of me! -Jo

    1. Nope. That was me. All fixed now.

  2. Rats! I am unable to attend today! I was hoping to hang with the cool group here. Jenny I am very interested in the idea of a regional digitization centre.

    Please do keep me in the loop. and I'll try my darnedest to be at the next meeting.

  3. Hi, Joanne: Thanks! The idea is to share the resources (staff/skills/equipments/applications) within OCUL because the challenges we are facing in our member libraries. I just added new things (Services and Challenges) in the proposal. I'm  open to any suggestions/ideas. Have a nice weekend everyone. I really enjoy meeting people in the group.