Conference Call Minutes: April 2014

Digital Archives Specialist Sub-Committee

Phone Conference

April 22, 2014

In Attendance:

Mia Capodilupo, Mahnaz Ghaznavi (chair), Ania Jaroszek, Lori Lindberg, Veronica Martzahl (secretary), Tom Rosko

Absent:

Liz Bishoff; Glen McAninch; Solveig de Sutter

Comprehensive Exam

The group reviewed the latest documents from psychometrician Sandy Dolan that summarize the results of the March 2014 comprehensive exam. The group discussed how the passing score was originally determined and that some issues raised by these reports may have been addressed during our meeting in Chicago. Based on the Chicago meeting, 18 questions are already slated for rewrite or revision. The sense of the group was that the perceived issue that too many people are passing could most effectively be addressed by increasing the level of difficulty for the rewritten questions since they will account for nearly 1/5 of the exam. Difficult pilot questions will also be needed for the August exam.

Question Generation

Action Item: Mahnaz Ghaznavi will follow up with each committee member on Monday, April 28, 2014 via email regarding their assigned questions.

Action Item: Veronica Martzahl will create a map for the applicable documents so that committee members can clearly locate their assignments and know where to submit new questions for appropriate numbers.

Action Item: Committee members should have their draft questions done by Friday, May 2, 2014.

The group briefly discussed the continued need for a database to manage the various versions of the questions over time and to quickly and easily generate the test documents.

Course Shepherding

The group discussed that Mark Myers will be leaving Kentucky for the Texas State Archives in the near future. It was unclear at the time of the meeting whether or not this will impact his ability to teach courses such as Electronic Records.

The Standard Course is in an updated draft form.

The Information Architecture course revision proposal has been submitted and reviewed by two committee members. The group will follow up with Solveig de Sutter to determine next steps.

Rachel Onuf has agreed to revise the Archival Collection Management Systems webinar and has drafted a timeline with Solveig for completion of this project.

Action Item: Veronica will check with Solveig on the status of a suggested developer for the Access course.

There is a call scheduled for April 28, 2014 for the Digital Forensics course. The group discussed the current configuration of the course and the sense of the group was that there would be benefit in developing a less technology heavy 1-day version of the course that would introduce the general concepts of the course without being bogged down with installation and implementation issues.

Solveig, Mahnaz, Nancy McGovern and Helen Tibbo discussed Digital Curation during a recent phone call. Veronica attended a presentation of half of this course at the recent New England Archivists conference.

Mahnaz and Ricc Ferrante discussed XML for Email Preservation during a recent phone call, highlighting issues around technology.

Lori Lindberg attended a recent presentation of Arrangement and Description and is writing up a report for Solveig. She will also be attending a Digital Curation course in Minnesota in June and will be teaching Digital Repositories in Alaska. She will be teaching this course using Greg and Jessica Colati’s slides and discussed this with Tom Rosko, the course’s shepherd.

Upcoming Phone Call

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

12 noon Eastern

11 am Central

10 am Mountain

9 am Pacific