Minutes of August 4, 2005 Meeting

Present:

Agnew; Au; Boyle; Calhoun; Gardner, R; Howard; Jantz Marker; Montanaro; Smulewitz (recorder); Weber.

Absent:

Sewell, Gorder

AUL Report: G. Agnew

• G. Agnew visited the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The center manages large scale data. It is a storage resource that is totally virtualized. The center can move stored data around in large quantities and can do so from one system to another without impacting the logical configuration of the data. The software application that provides this functionality is called Storage Resource Broker.
  
  San Diego Supercomputer Center is developing an API for Storage Resource Broker, that will provide better functionality for storage management, particularly for federated collection management between Fedora sites, both within RUL and with other Fedora sites, such as NJIT.

• G. Agnew, E. Gorder, J. Johnson attended a conference convened by the National Library of Medicine to determine whether or not preservation standards exist for digital video-both for metadata to manage preservation and a preservation encoding standard. .Grace Agnew presented an overview of the state of the art for digital video metadata, particularly the solutions adopted by MIC and the Rutgers repository.

• M-JPEG 2000 for video archiving is a highly compressed international standard that provides excellent quality with highly efficient compression. However, M-JPEG2000 is not currently integrated into standard editing, encoding and streaming applications, which are critical for transcoding from the master to standard web formats and for editing to add color bar and sound checks to the master, The general consensus was that M-JPEG2000 holds considerable promise, but needs more widespread adoption by commercial applications before it can become an archival master standard. Large government agencies will be encouraged to require this integration with standard encoding, editing and streaming tools in RFPs, etc, to enable M-JPEG2000 to mature as an archival standard, similar to TIFF for images.. Yale is using M-JPEG2000 as a narchival master but then compressing the source video a second time to create an editable, transcodable master (I-frame only MPEG-2)

• NYU is transferring everything to DIGIBETA which is commercial and proprietary and is not standard. It provides mild compression. NYUs hope is that it will be able to migrate from DIGIBETA to an international digital video standard, such as M-JPEG2000, within the next five years. In the meantime, DIGIBETA will provide a stable and standardized storage medium. Many of the attendees questioned the expense and effort involved in this interim strategy. Yale and NYU illustrate the problems archives with significant video holdings are experiencing because of the lack of an archival standard.

• RUL will use the MATROX DigiSuites platform, which can provide uncompressed video as well as standards-based and transcodable compression, which is vitually lossless. .As with the NYU and Yale strategies, this is an interim strategy, but less expensive and not requiring duplicate encoding from the analog source, as the Yale and NYU strategies require.

• R. Jantz, reported that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has put out to bid for a preservation platform for the Electronic Records Archives. Harris Corporation is a likely candidate for the bid. Harris Corporation includes Fedora

• Princeton University may not participate in the VTLS development of the commercial Fedora repository, VITAL. They asked when the RUL WMS will be available through Open Source. Collaboration must be a part of preservation.

• NISO will conduct a series of workshops on Metasearch and OpenURL, September 19th-21st, 2005. They will discuss different implementations, standards and innovations and future directions. Grace Agnew, Ann Montanaro and Dave Hoover will attend. Grace Agnew is presenting at the workshop. Most metasearch vendors will be attending. Public Service Council and Technical Service Council are collaborating on an initiative to look at all searching performed at RUL and the tools used to assist.

Repository Development and Technical Management - (handout distributed)

A steering committee, with multiple working groups reporting to the Steering Committee, will be formed to continue the development and ongoing maintenance of the repository. The Steering Committee will include the chairs of the working groups associated with the development. The handout will be revised regarding working group memberships and chairs, resulting from the discussion today.

The groups are:

A Steering Committee

Working Groups : Architecture; Metadata; Staffing; Faculty Services/Applications and Training and Outreach.

A. Montanaro suggested that reports from the working groups should be submitted to the Steering Committee in writing.

The council discussed how priorities are established for repository projects. Right now the priority is based on the Library Strategic Plan In order to help gauge the order of priority, library faculty need to be aware of departmental grants that are being issued. The marketing plan for the repository will be coordinated with the Digital Repository Review Committtee (DRRC).

A review of 2005 goals and accomplishments

ARL statistics

The council discussed the discrepancies in statistics collection. The hope is that Director's Station (DS) will be helpful to this process. Its role has to be established. A benchmark must be established for statistics so that with the help of DS the statistics will be meaningful. It was noted that ARL statistics are being evaluated to determine what statistics are going to be important to research libraries in the future.

Other

R. Becker or a representative from the Strategic Planning Committee will be invited to a future Technical Services Council meeting to provide insight into the strategic planning discussions.

(Handout)

Repository Development and Technical Management

Repository Steering Committee:

Working Groups:

Architecture

Metadata

Staffing:

Faculty Services / Applications

Training and Outreach