The Media Vault Program brought together users of its first generation services Friday afternoon, September 11, to share updates, gather feedback on functional requirements for a “generation 2” service and plan for a larger community workshop. Following closely on the heels of last week’s workshop of access, preservation and digital curation service providers, Friday’s meeting furthered MVP’s push to provide campus with tools to keep research data safe and easy to share.
Media Vault users heard about a number of preservation, access and digital curation services currently available to campus or soon to come on line. Bernie Hurley of the Library Systems Office spoke about the Library’s WebGenDL digital asset management service. “The Library has been using this system to manage its digital assets for about five years,” Hurley said. In addition to helping researchers catalogue their data and manage the related metadata, the Library can also help Media Vault users and program staff:
- Create persistent identifiers for their materials
- Integrate with the California Digital Library’s Digital Preservation Repository
- Surface collections for discovery
- Make contact with other researchers, and
- Starting in November, access legal counsel regarding intellectual property issues.
Hurley repeated the Library’s generous offer to make 16TB of storage available to the Media Vault Program.
John Kunze of the California Digital Library’s Digital Preservation department followed Hurley. Kunze articulated CDL’s vision to be “recognized as the hub of digital preservation and curation activities for University of California.” He described the types of materials that the CDL handles, including its web site archive and tools for web site harvesting. Then, he discussed the CDL’s new digital curation initiative. “Preservation in not a place,” Kunze said. “It comes to the user.” Rather than relying on “monolithic, single-culture systems” to maintain digital objects, the CDL is developing a set of independent but interoperable “micro-services” to handle all aspects of curation, which can be applied throughout the object’s lifecycle. The first of these, to be available starting in January 2010, will pertain to identity and storage.
Noah Wittman presented on the Media Vault Service’s “Gen2” platform selection process and roadmap. Building upon its experience with Extensis Portfolio and NetPublish, and keeping a keen eye on the entire ecosystem of access, preservation and curation services available to the campus community, the Media Vault Service is working to develop a recommendation for its future platform within the next six weeks. The new platform should take advantage of existing services and address the gaps where existing services don’t fill user needs.
Following the round of presentations from service providers, the workshop participants turned their attention to assessing a list of functional requirements for a new platform. (See the Functional Requirements page of the Media Vault wiki.) This exercise provided an opportunity for community members to share experiences in a group setting, and for program staff to benefit from the collective expertise of Media Vault users.
The remainder of the workshop focused on planning for the larger community workshop scheduled for the end of October. Conversations revolved around how to attract campus members to that event, especially given the increased stress and workload caused by the budget crisis. More generally, how can the Media Vault Program motivate campus scholars to try its services? Finally, what would it look like if MVP could ramp up its service from 2% of campus to 15%?
