2023 Fall/Winter Member Meeting Recap
February 22, 2024
APTrust held a 2023 Fall/Winter member meeting at Georgetown University on December 13-14. This rather dry and informational post summarizes the lively and engaging conversations we had with each other. It’s always energizing when APTrusters gather to talk shop and enjoy the mutual company.
2022-2023 in Review
- 20 sustaining members, including two new institutions: Virginia Commonwealth University and Occidental College.
- 320 TB of unique content preserved in Registry, showing steady and solid growth.
- APTrust had a surplus of $134,834 which was added to our operating reserves. See Budget Reports for additional details.
- Hired Nathan Tallman as Executive Director, replacing Bradley Daigle on January 1, 2024.
Group Updates
- The Archivists Interest Group is looking for new speakers to continue their Knowledge Sharing webinar series.
- The Communications & Policies Working Group will submit three policies to the Advisory Committee for review in 2024. Additionally, Kevin Clair took over as co-chair from Jamie Bradway and is searching for a co-chair.
- The Certification Working Group continues its review of Trusted Digital Repository documentation and is preparing to sunset the wiki after migrating everything to the website.
- APTrust will consider starting a new group focused on bagging, workflows, and integrations.
Technical Updates
- Registry is performing well under heavy loads and is much less resource-intensive than Pharos. New features include a deposits overtime report, partial identifier searching, and an improved file characterization report. Planned activity includes optimizing the PREMIS events table, implementing bulk delete, UI/UX improvements, and exportable reports.
- Preservation Services has experienced throttling imposed by AWS on certain container types. Larger containers are being used as a mitigating strategy while a long-term solution is worked out with AWS.
- DART has seen an increase in users. It is currently being rewritten entirely in Go for increased sustainability, performance, and extensibility. DART and DART Runner will merge in this latest version. Additional UI/UX testing work is planned.
- Technical documentation continues to be generated by student workers and APTrust staff.
- The Wasabi proof-of-concept project resulted analysis of the NAT Gateway used to provide our cloud infrastructure with an internet connection. The analysis was presented to the Advisory Committee who recommended removing the NAT Gateway to reduce data transfer fees and increase security.
- Infrastructure-as-Code and automation templates are performing and scaling well.
- New policies and practices for AWS key management implemented.
Associate Members
There was much discussion of how Sustaining Members can use Associate Memberships to extend their outreach by providing preservation storage to strategic partners. APTrust currently has five active Associate Members working with three Sustaining Members. Associate Memberships can be a powerful tool to show a return on investment and help organizations meet their own strategic goals. There is no single approach or model for successfully creating Associate Members. Nathan Tallman will work on a toolkit when he becomes Executive Director in 2024.
Strategic Planning
The APTrust Strategic Plan and Core Principles document, Version 2.0 includes a strategic plan for 2021-2026. At the meeting, Advisory Committee members assessed this plan and its three goals and supporting strategies. In general, the plan was found to be hard to measure and lacking specificity. Nathan Tallman will work with the Governing Board and Advisory Committee to update the current plan in 2024. The goal will not be to re-write the entire plan but to refine and improve our current one.