Hello everyone,

I too missed the call - I'm not currently a member of the Infrastructure Committee, but Linda and Kara raise some great points. As some of you know, I come from the commercial side of the archival business.

Linda pointed out that "one size fits all" may not work. I concur, as in many cases, the release date of a project is more important to the asset owner than the archival process, so the data moves all over the place, hopefully to be put back in a "container" that contains all A/V files, including audio, liner notes, crediting, artwork, etc. That moving target appears over a 3-6 month period - so how does one properly address this without upsetting the apple cart of sales and marketing?

There was also the mention of constraints - we can script out a way to do a fixity check for LTOs and append that to the tape reviewed, but if most of them are laying fallow in a vault, what is the trigger to determine they need to be fixity checked? Record label vaults tend NOT to review data tape backups that have not recouped their recording costs - while I don't agree with the premise, it is reality, and there at some level needs to be some marketing (and I hate to use that word in the context of archiving) or other documentation from NDSA that we (I, or anybody else) can distribute around to the various IT departments.

Kara makes a good point about what data should be stored - I would say that any IT department worth it's salt would keep records of both good and bad - as comprehensive as possible - in my world, I'd be happy to report "only bad" as a worst-case scenario, but to me personally that's just a band-aid, but at least it's a good band-aid.

Can the 4 levels of digital preservation as Karen mentioned work for improving the knowledge of fixity?

Speak soon! 

John
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On Nov 11, 2013, at 10:48 AM, Kara Van Malssen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I also want to apologize for missing the call. I have a few thoughts to add:
> 
> I agree with the important points that Linda has made. On the final point, regarding metadata capture - this question in general should also be addressed. Options for how/where metadata related to fixity is stored, how it is updated, retained, etc. Should you retain outcome of all fixity checks, time/date, outcome regardless of whether good/bad? Only bad? Should this information be stored separately from your other preservation metadata? What are the options/trade offs?
> 
> Finally, is there a Google Doc where this info is being collected/edited? I only see the Word Doc, which is probably getting hard to manage with the inputs coming through via email.
> 
> Hope to join you on the next call, and looking forward to working on this project.
> 
> Thanks,
> Kara
> 
> 
> 
> Kara Van Malssen
> AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
> 350 7th Ave., Suite 1603
> New York, NY 10001
> 
> office: 917-475-9630 x 2
> mobile: 917-842-9586
> 
> http://www.avpreserve.com
> facebook.com/avpreserve
> twitter.com/avpreserve
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Nov 10, 2013, at 3:30 PM, Linda Tadic <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I'm very sorry that I missed this call. I suspect that my comments below were already mentioned during the call by others, but in case they weren't here goes.
>> 
>> What a great start to a useful document. I like that it will explain why there can't be a set overall standard for scheduling fixity checks other than it should be run when a file is moved -- timing depends so much on storage medium and infrastructure.
>> 
>> top of p.2: Constraints. Add more info on fixity checks of files on tape. Oracle/Sun/StorageTek drives (choose your name) can run checks while the tapes are in situ in the drives, so the files needn't be copied to servers and checked there. LTO drives can't do that (yet) so the files must be copied up to servers for checking, adding lots of work and strain on the infrastructure. However, I say "yet" because I corresponded with someone in IBM's LTO R&D department. They're working on a driver to check files in situ on LTO LTFS drives. She thought it'd be released Q2 2014.
>> 
>> p. 2: more on the trend to run frame-level checksums on very large video files (uncompressed, DPX) as a preservation act. If there are frame-level checksums, then the error can be immediately identified rather than knowing vaguely that the file is corrupt somewhere.
>> 
>> Add: metadata that should be captured, following PREMIS: algorithm type, value, creation software, date created, who created it, when checked, result.
>> 
>> Best,
>> Linda
>> 
>> 
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Owens, Trevor" <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2013 5:39 AM
>> Subject: [NDSA-INFRASTRUCTURE] Infrastructure Call Today: 2PM EST on Fixity check project
>> 
>> 
>> Reminder, today we have our working group call. This time focused on discussing ways forward on the fixity check project. (See Karen's message below.)
>> 
>> As a way to try and kick off the conversation, I started sketching out what could be the basis of a short document on fixity checking. It's really just a straw man for us to use for the purposes of figuring out what we actually would like to produce.
>> 
>> I had a hard time making all of this fit into a neat grid but I think we could make something that just spells out different goals, approaches and constraints.
>> 
>> Time: 2:00 PM EST, Oct 29th
>> 
>> The call in number will always be:
>> Call-in number:  866-469-3239
>> Participant access code:  21408589
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: The NDSA infrastructure working group list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Karen Cariani
>> Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2013 4:37 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: [NDSA-INFRASTRUCTURE] Fixity check project
>> 
>> Hi everyone,
>> 
>> I'm sorry for my delay in getting this going.  Since there were a number of you interested, I figured I'd just use the list serv for the project work. We can use regular phone calls too if there is nothing else going on during that month.
>> 
>> Lets start with the notes form the call:  Most of the participants on the call were interested in either or both of these issues.
>> 
>> 1.  Getting started with fixity practices. This could, for example, work through the each of the 4 fixity levels in the NDSA levels of digital preservation. The goal here would be to work through how to get started, different kinds of approaches and tools you can use to establish your workflows.
>> 2.  Fixity trade offs decision tool. Given different systems, different kinds of content, different scales of content etc. there should be different approaches to the frequency of fixity checking. There is interest in developing some kind of grid, or decision tree that could help orgs decide the best approach to how frequently to check the fixity of their content.
>> 
>> Anyone interested in number 1 specifically or number 2?  Should we start on both and see how it breaks out?
>> For number 2 were a number of ways we could break this out and look at it, or rather a number of parameters to frame it.  Here are the ones listed above:
>> 
>> System type
>> Type of content
>> Scale of content (not sure what this means) Frequency based on those factors Any others?
>> 
>> Karen
>> 
>> 
>> 
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