Member Institutions Meet in Columbus
May 22, 2014
Forty-nine APTrust members convened on May 5, 2014 just prior to the Association of Research Libraries meeting in Columbus Ohio at the Downtown Renaissance Hotel. View program here:
On the day before, May 4, the APTrust board, plus deans Matthew Dames (Syracuse University), Charles Eckman (University of Miami), and Xuemao Wang (University of Cincinnati) met with APTrust staff and consultants Teri Goodall-Komar and William Monopoli to engage in strategic planning, agenda here:
The group achieved consensus on a vision, mission, and strategic goals. View here:
In addition, Karin Wittenborg and Martha Sites gave a presentation that provided clarification about the relationship of the University of Virginia and Academic Preservation Trust.
The Spring Meeting on May 5 began with Chair Pat Steele introducing Penn State University, the 17th APTrust member institution, and Dean Barbara Dewey. She also introduced the new systems engineer, Andrew Diamond, and content lead, Bradley Daigle.
Karin Wittenborg and Martha Sites (University of Virginia) repeated their presentation for the membership about the relationship of the University of Virginia and APTrust and encouraged questions and discussion.
Most of the morning was spent in working groups that considered the Board recommendations for vision, mission, and strategic goals. Six groups worked together and reported out. In sum, the groups believe the vision should be spiked up and the mission needs to reflect the larger DPN mission (a national effort) and member institutions. There was clear agreement on APTrust needing more national visibility, as was the importance of developing sustainability and business plans and finishing governance documents. Members made a resounding call for a roadmap that describes the steps needed to achieve a completely operational repository.
Prior to lunch, Scott Turnbull (University of Virginia), Charles Blair (University of Chicago), Andrew Diamond (University of Virginia) and Paul Mather (Virginia Tech) talked about APTrust technology, testing, and operations. Scott’s slides are available here:
The afternoon was devoted to reports from the Certification Working Group (Stephen Davis, Columbia University, chair), the Academic Cloud Services Working Group (Linda Newman, University of Cincinnati, chair), Beta Testers reports, and a new group led by Babak Hamidzadah (University of Maryland) that will encourage service level agreements and specifications.
The remainder of the afternoon was spent in discussion groups: Content and Certification Advisory Group, Technology Advisory Groups and the Deans group. The advisory groups developed agendas for forthcoming monthly meetings.
The deans reaffirmed the importance of completing governance documents and operational guidelines and developing a sustainability plan. They also recommended updating the APTrust brochure. They touched on the involvement of their staff in APTrust, understanding more about how APTrust fits into the ecosystem of digital preservation, understanding the costs for digital preservation, and developing use cases to help their campuses understand the importance of digital preservation, particularly data, and the role of APTrust.
Most important, they recommended that the full APTrust membership meet once a year in the fall prior to ARL. In the spring the deans will meet prior to ARL and the membership will meet at an APTrust host institution.
With this recommendation in mind, the full APTrust membership will meet on October 6th in Washington, DC. Details to follow.