Meeting Minutes: January 2012

Society of American Archivists

DAS Subcommittee Meeting

January 26-27, 2012

SAA Office – Chicago, IL

Minutes

Thursday, January 26, 1:00 pm to 5:30 pm.

Present: Lori Lindberg, chair; Mahnaz Ghaznavi, Mark Matienzo, committee members; Solveig De Sutter, Director of Education; and Amanda Look, Education Coordinator.  Absent: Liz Bishoff, committee member.

Review and Approval of the Agenda – (Lindberg)

Goals for this meeting: included finding a streamlined approach for new program development, review processes, and a quality final product.

Resulting discussion resulted in a modified proposal form consisting of three sections that include proposal evaluation; reviewer comments, developer feedback, and the audit form. 

The subcommittee reviewed the courses listed below and made the following suggestions: 

1. Legal Issues for Digital Archives

• Content is very comprehensive but deemed too much for one day.  Offer Parts one and two in the face to face one-day workshop and turn Part three into a webinar.  Outline is missing.    

2. Appraisal of Electronic Records

Reviewers felt that the content is too basic and doesn’t begin to focus on Appraisal of Electronic Records until slide 60.

Overview of Electronic Records is too extensive; especially since the course description paragraph includes:

○    “What should you know already?”  Basic knowledge about digital preservation and electronic records as well as archival appraisal of records. 

• Too much focus on paper
• Reduce the content in slides 1-32 significantly but retain slides 7, 8, and 13. 
• Add more to the appraisal content … perhaps a case study. 
• Bring in existing articles from Archival Outlook and/or more recent articles from American Archivist. 
• Consider laying out distinctions between the various requirements (p. 24) and bring in the process of developing functional requirements.  Though reviewers acknowledged that isn’t the focus of the course, “attendees would be well-served by becoming aware of such tools as DIRKS (ISO 15489) to assist them in the requirements process.  This will then help tie in with other courses such as Standards.  Another tie-in is the Project Management Institute in looking for a good project manager, or for additional training.   
• Reviewers also noted that the bibliography isn’t up to date and asked for more recent materials. 
• Consider changing recordkeeping system to “records management application.
• Rethink the content, focus on the appraisal of digital records and decision aspects that come before accession and take accession out altogether. 

3. Developing Specifications and RFPs for Recordkeeping Systems

• Suggest laying out distinctions between the various requirements and bring in some talk about the process of developing these requirements. Attendees should be told about Dirks and a brief mention of the Project Management Institute.
• The subcommittee agrees that Ms. Ghering’s proposal is one of the best they’ve seen and commend her for her efforts.

4. Digital Forensics for Archivists

• Very strong, robust course, great exercises.
• 300 slides are too much; scale down number of examples (poor quality scans).  Get the same effect by taking the choice examples from common file formats. 
• May consider starting at 8 am. 
• Let’s see if first set of participants feels that that this is too much content.
• Content looks good, course description is fantastic.

Motion to adjourn (Lindberg/Ghaznavi).

Friday, January 27, 8:00 am to 3:00 pm

Liz Bishoff was able to join at 10:10 am.

Subcommittee members reviewed the DAS Development and Exam Protocols including current and proposed practices and looked at various DAS exams to suggest revised/reworded questions. Staff provided DAS Exam results and statistics so members could valuate the processes and outcomes.

This resulted in a directive to increase the question pool for 2-day courses to 40 (from 30), for 1-day courses to 30 (from 25), and for webinars to 15 (from 10).  

Ghaznavi recommended that staff look into similar Education Programs with certificate programs to see their criteria and practices e.g. AMIA.

Staff asked about length of time between fails and retakes and the ensuing discussion resulted in the recommendations listed below. 

Policy Recommendations to Education Committee:

1. First re-take is free, second re-take is charged ($35.00 for members, $55.00 for non-members).
2. If you fail the second re-take, you must re-take the program again (at a discounted rate) before you can re-take the exam.
3. Once you’ve re-taken a course you must pass the exam. If you fail, you must purchase the program at full price and try again.

Subcommittee discussed the current passing grade for DAS exams (75%) and decided to increase the number of questions per exams as well as the pass percentage. 

Recommendation to Education Committee 

Recommendation to Education Committee

To increase the passing grade to 85% or above, following accepted graduate school grading scale:

97-100   A
94-96    A-
91-93    B+
88-90    B
85-87    B-
82-84    C+
79-81    C
76-78    C-
73-75    D+
70-72    D
67-69    D-
Below 67         F

Next followed a spirited discussion about the development workflow and developer/reviewer deliverables.  (See attached photo).

Contract/Deliverable

Proposal

▼

Revision

                 ► yes                     ▼Need revision

                           no◄

▼                                            ▼ yes

Revised product

no                       no◄

                                                ▼ yes

Finished product

                                                ▼

Exam Stats

Audit

Students FB

▼

Revision needed

(Shepherd Reviews)

                           no◄

▼ yes

6 months from proposal to presentation

This was followed by a discussion about working toward a re-organization form tier structure to digital lifecycle. This should help show how the DAS programs mix in with the existing non-DAS SAA courses. This is a long-term recommendation that we do and use internally.

Members talked about the difficulty (amount of time) in regards to doing all the reviews necessary to fully monitor development of DAS courses and exams to ensure a quality product and agreed that more subcommittee members are needed. Four more members would ensure that each topic area could be covered. 

Recommendation to Education Committee

To increase number of subcommittee members by four.

Discussion of the DCC Life Cycle Model followed and concluded with consensus among the members to rely on the ACE Guidelines as laid out in the Education Catalog to determine where each DAS program falls.

The subcommittee reviewed ACE categories assigned to each DAS course in the Education Catalog and felt that some of the courses should be moved into a more appropriate category.

Debate continued over the best way to involve the DAS developer and instructor cadre in the review and education process to avoid unnecessary overlap between courses and encourage monitoring each other’s courses.  One way is to give everyone access to the course content that is currently uploaded in Lindberg’s Google account.  Recommendations included adding a clause that stipulates people who are given access to the DAS Google account should sign an agreement acknowledging copyright and confidentiality. 

The subcommittee discussed having another faculty session at the SAA Annual Meeting for DAS faculty. They believe it will be beneficial to bring the group together to foster discussion, ideas, feedback, and teambuilding.

Recommendation to Education Committee

To incorporate a DAS Faculty/Developer Session at the end of the Education Committee Meeting in San Diego.

The group recommends that the DAS Subcommittee should meet twice a year at the SAA Office in Chicago. The group agreed that August 27-28 will be our next meeting if the Education Committee and the SAA Council approve that recommendation. The group agreed that the next conference call will be Feb 22 at 2:00pm Central Time. The following conference call will be April 19 at 1:00pm Central Time.

Recommendation to Education Committee

To allow the DAS Subcommittee to meet twice a year at the SAA Office in Chicago.

At the next DAS Subcommittee meeting:

• Look at digital lifecycle and look at what courses we do have. This will identify gaps and help us identify what courses we need to still develop.

Follow-up: Finding auditors for Information Architecture webinar on February 9 at 1:00pm Central Time.

Finally, the subcommittee discussed the outline for Digital Repositories workshop:

• Recommend moving Module 6 to the place of Module 4
• Under “components” - how literal is this? Outsourced components?
• The subcommittee requests seeing more so that they can review before the March 23 workshop

Motion to adjourn (Lindberg/Ghaznavi).

STAFF TO DOS:

1. Remove “Program” from Audit Form title and make it “DAS Audit Form”. Done
2. Combine Forms and provide access to information about tiers, tracks, functions, core competencies, and SAA catalog within the forms. In the process of making the form interactive.
3. Get back to Besser, Ghering, Lee, and Wojcik; Done
4. Add language to Classmarker message at end of filed exam (Amanda and I forgot what that meant )
5. Incorporate new development workflow and developer/reviewer deliverables into processes. (Ongoing process with NEW courses).