Meeting Minutes for 03/06/2019

Digital Archive Committee Minutes
March 6, 2019
1:00 PM

1. Creating a Best Practices or Procedures Group Discussion (Lead by Brandon)

• Scheduling a meeting with a group of people who are interested in setting the best practices and policies on how to best add content into the archive.
• As we add new members and maintain the archives it would be good to have a reference source for policies, procedures and best practices when adding content to the archives.
• Some libraries would like to participate but do not have a full-time experience archivist, and having a best practices document would be helpful for those libraries.
• The archives should contain quality connected content instead of being a dropbox for unconnected digital content.
• The group decided it would be best to have this discussion during the regular Digital Archive Committee (DAC) scheduled meeting time.  Anyone who is interested may attend.
• This documentation should serve a couple purposes.
  • It should include the standards, and information that will make someone successful with their project.
• It was discovered that some of the existing documents from the former committee were no longer available due to access issues.  The person who created the document no longer works for the library where the Google document was stored.
  • Digital Repository Standards Committee documentation
  • Metadata Working Group DAC minutes
  • Metadata Working Group DAC recording
• Brandon will start an email thread for this topic, please attach any other documentation to this thread.

2. Next DPLA Ingest  (Lead by Brandon)

• Marisa Wood is the Statewide Collaborative Programming Coordinator for the Colorado State Library.
• Marisa is replacing Amy Hitchner.
• Her work with the Marmot Digital Archives would be in relation to AspenCat libraries eligibility to participate with the assistance of the state library.
• Leigh Jeremias from the Colorado Virtual Library shared that the next DPLA ingest is scheduled for April.
• Between now and March 25th, look at the current ingest that let us know if you want any changes made to the content or metadata map from our system into DPLA.
• April 1st to April 15th, they will work on harvesting anything from the feed both old and new, so they will capture any previous ingested content with changes.
  • Any changes you would like made or added contact Brandon.  He will talk to you about the available options for the Marmot feed, and getting the content mapped over to DPLA. The more advanced notice helps with scheduling this work with the Software Development group. These changes need to be made before April 1st.
• April 15th - April 16th, sometime between the DPLA harvests all the partner collections from the Plains to Peak collective will be visible in DPLA.
• Demo on how to switch over a collection to be viewable in DPLA
  • The original ingest only included select content.  Now that there is a live ingest any collection or content can be added.
  • Send an email to pika-at-marmot.org, if you want Marmot to make a collection level change for your collections to be shared with DPLA.

3. Entity Inclusion Discussion (Lead by Alysa)

• When the Digital Archives was created the intention of a controlled vocabulary was through entities.
• Even though LC Subject Headings were used for all of the objects, if a entity was created it was not duplicated as an LC Subject Heading.
• Could we come to a place where we do start to include those entities that we have attached to our objects as subject that are supplied to DPLA.
• For the first ingest, the group used the LC Subject Headings.
• There were a number of people in the group who do not want to include the entities in the DPLA feed.
  • However, for the libraries who came onboard early, those entities were supposed to be their subject headings.
  • The only reason the those libraries put LC Subject Headings in an object’s record is to connect that object to the catalog, because that was their understanding about how Pika was setup to work with the Digital Archives.
  • People’s name are not included in the LC Subject Headings
    • If an article is about an individual, that primary individual’s name is on the article,  but if other people were mentioned in the article those are entities that were added to the described field.
    • People, places, events and organizations are the only entities that can be created. They are all very specific.  Alysa would encourage the group to include them all, because they were not put in unless they were pertinent.
• The group would need to decide if all entities should be included such as people, organizations, places and events.
• Please speak up if you think adding all the entities will affect your discovery in the DPLA.
  • Joy chatted in that since she is making the effort to put them in, it would be nice if they got used.
  • Matthew agreed with Joy.
• Here is Pika ticket about this issue.
• DAC minutes from June 26, 2018  --the “DPLA Display Issues” section contains the discussion about using entities as subjects.
• Action Item: Brandon will send out an email asking for approval to move forward with adding entities as subjects to the DPLA feed.
• Action Item: Pascal will look at the raw data to see if it is what the group would want in the next cycle of the DPLA feed. He would like to give everyone a chance to review it first. Pascal will wait for the current ingest to process, and will schedule the development for the next feed.  Pascal will put it in test site for members to review the feed data that would be sent to DPLA. He would ask you to look at your specific objects to make sure they are displaying correctly.

Other Topics and Questions

• The Zoom meeting link has been changed.  The new link is available on Marmot Meeting and Webinars calendar.
• During the Discovery Committee meeting on March 5, 2019, Adam Murray mentioned there is still an open position for a Digital Archives person.   
  • The plans to fill that vacant position has not been decided.  
  • If you think Marmot is missing some expertise (like an archivist) for the Digital Archives, please provide that information to Marmot.
• Any ticket that has been opened for Digital Archives is that on hold with Pika taking precedence?
  • It is not that Software Development is not going to work on Digital Archive tickets, they are working towards getting Pika in a stable build that will be an out of the box situation.
  • Software Development will focus on the  stability issues, so Digital Archives was not in the top stack of priorities.
  • If there is a ticket that you think is very important for the Digital Archives that you want included in the Pika Roadmap,  please provide that information to Marmot.

Next meeting is Tuesday, March 19th at 1:00 p.m.