Meeting Minutes for 10/30/2019

Digital Archive Committee Minutes
October 30, 2019
1:00 PM

Round Robin Project Discussion (all)

• Adam State
  • Mary reports that they have a new librarian who will be working on putting their Thesis into the archives
• Bud Werner
  • John reports that they are waiting on a few new projects
    • They might be working on some oral histories regarding some hot springs in the downtown area
    • They have their eyes on the Steamboat magazine 
    • As well as some foreign digital content related to cemeteries and sheriffs of Routt County and identifying entities for future projects
    • They have been pouring through the historical guide to Routt County
  • They celebrated the formal completion of Three Wire Winter at an event earlier in the week
• Englewood
  • Selene is working on uploading/migrating info for their existing archive.  She should be finished with the uploading part soon.
• Gunnison 
  • Jill has a couple of projects in the works.  She has not had much time for the Digital Archive lately.  She has been working on passing a ballot question so that has taken a lot of everyone's time and bandwidth.
• Mesa County
  • Elizabeth reports that they finished uploading up to 2018 of Art on the Corner
  • They finished digitizing the 2018 & 2019 temporary ones, and will hopefully get those up by the end of the year so they will be all up-to-date on the Art on the Corner collection
  • They are just about to start working on uploading Crossing the Divide, which is a podcast that they co-sponsor along with Rocky Mountain PBS, into the archives
• Telluride
  • Allison is working on the Telluride cemetery

Other Topics

• Purpose of the Digital Archive
  • Postponed until the next meeting
• Alison mentioned that she has been studying digital preservation and wondered if everyone’s stuff will be in the archive in 10 years or 20 years from now?
  • Brandon responded the goal is to have all projects be available for as long as Marmot can make them available
  • He stated that there are not any plans to remove any content 
  • A lot of the content that is being captured right now is timeless, and historical content that people will want to view
  • He thinks the formats might change over time  
  • The availability of the content is a Marmot primary goal based on the wants of this group
• Jill commented especially the content that is going into DPLA, should last for a long time online
  • Brandon agreed with Jill’s statement and mentioned that having the secondary upload is important as well
  • Having the DPLA links from their system to our system just makes it that much more valuable
• Alison asked as formats change (like the jpg, for example) will we update the formats in Islandora?
  • Brandon responded that traditionally the difficult part about changing format is a loss of the quality over time, especially with things like images (making copies of copies) that will degrade over time 
  • Brandon did not have an answer to Alison’s question right now and opened up the discussion to the group
  • John mentioned that he assumed that Marmot has an agreement with Islandora that if they were going to tank, they would have all of our content and deliver it to us 
  • Brandon responded that even if Islandora did tank, the Marmot server would still be online, so Marmot would still be able to harvest all the content 
  • Marmot hosts the server locally.  
  • The content on the Marmot server is not tied to anything in Islandora and could assess the content in its current state 
  • Marmot would not be able to update any new formats, because there would not be any new Islandora software
  • Liz attended an archive conference and her understanding is that the TIFF format is the standard for image files right now and not JPEG, because JPEG is so lossy.  Every time you save a JPEG, you lose some clarity.
  • Brandon mentioned that the current standard could be converted to a new standard with the proper software
• Metadata Subcommittee Group Meeting 
  • Postponed until the next meeting 

Next Meeting is November 19, 2019, at 1 p.m.

Agenda

• Purpose of the Archive
  • Come with questions and thoughts on the things you want to see in the archives, and how you want to see the archives proceed into the future