2015-01-16 Meeting Notes

• 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.  

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 4 interest group is working on design documents, working towards 100% integration with Drupal, consolidating Git repositories.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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. 

• 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.