Dear Infrastructure Working Group Members, 

I drafted notes about yesterday's call and posted them to the wiki. (I also included them at the end of this message). Please feel free to add, edit and revise. 

http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Wednesday,_September_21,_2011 

Best, 
Trevor 

Trevor Owens
Digital Archivist
National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program
Office of Strategic Initiatives
The Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave SE
Washington DC 20540-1300
202.707.7217

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Infrastructure Working Group Call: Wednesday, September 21, 2011

1. Where we are at on the NDSA preservation storage study:
At this point the end of the storage project is in sight. We need to get response rate up and document non-response, work on interpreting the results, and then fold those results into the draft document we are working on. From there we can identify some additional questions that we might return to, and then dig into a new project. We discussed the idea of starting on a new project in the new year.

2. Need for a higher response rate and/or better understanding of non-response:
We started out by recognizing a need for a higher response rate, or at least to have a more systematic understanding of non-response before getting into really interpreting the data. Trevor agreed to send out another email to the NDSA-ALL list to attempt to get further responses. Undoubtedly, there will still need to be more work required to get the response rate up and identify why some members did not respond. We will coordinate this additional work over the list.

3. Potential reasons for non-response:
On the call several participants mentioned that the length of the survey may be one of the causes of non-response. It was also suggested that many member organizations do not themselves have preservation storage systems (for example, consortia, associations, service providers, funders etc.) Lastly, some of the member organizations may have joined at the institution level, but in fact are really involved at a department, or program level. In those cases the participants from a given member organization may not know what the institutions preservation system looks like. In any event, we agreed that before drawing inferences from any results we should document non-response. For that reason, we included a contact on the latest ask to members to fill out the survey for members to contact us if their organization does not have preservation storage systems, or if they are otherwise unable to respond. Before the next call we will try to start pining down specifics about non-responses.

4. New questions, and issues for interpretation:
On the call there were several suggestions that we think about incorporating other questions, or that we at least keep these issues in mind when we eventually do move to interpret results from the survey. Specifically, that some of the results may be shaped by the kinds of content a given member works with (text, audio, video, datasets, etc). It was suggested that we can make some inferences about content types from member organizations, so we do have some ability to see what kind of factor that may play. With that said, it will be important to keep in mind the fact that we have not asked about content types in the survey. The second broader set of questions revolved around costs of storage and the role that costs play in these decisions. Again, we do not have cost related questions in the survey, so for this survey we will need to keep in mind that we do not have data on this to interpret. Andrea, John, and Michelle each expressed interest winnowing down the questions before the next call.

5. Making the survey shorter for additional audiences: 
Several members were interested in taking some core set of these questions and using it to cast a much broader net, potentially for comparison, or as part of some additional project. Over the next month we will take turns winnowing down the survey and discussing it over the list. John was particularly interested and potentially willing to take on passing a shorter survey out to commercial companies - SONY, Disney, Warner Bros, to see be able to speak to their systems. As a first step on this, John volunteered to put out some preliminary inquiries to find out what kinds of things they would be comfortable telling us about.

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