NDIIPP July 2009 Partners Meeting 
Breakout Session Notes / Session # 2

Organizational Agreements for Collaboration 
2009 Partners Meeting
Thursday, June 25, 2008
10:30 – 12:30 p.m.

Presenters:  
A. Mutual Digital Preservation Contracts and Agreements 
Panel Discussion
Dwayne Buttler, MetaArchive Cooperative 
Myron Gutmann, DataPASS Project 
Victoria Reich, Stanford University
Julie Sweetkind-Singer, NGDA Project 

B. Rowing in the Same Direction – Collaboration across Disparate Organizations 
Panel Discussion 
Matthew R. Guzzi, South Carolina Department of Archives and History 
Alan S. Nelson, State Library and Archives of Florida 
Abbie Norderhaug, Wisconsin Historical Society 
Richard Pearce-Moses, Arizona State Library 
Bonita L. Weddle, New York State Archives 
Facilitator: Matthew Guzzi

Number of Attendees:  30 (including panelists)

Panel A - Mutual Digital Preservation Contracts and Agreements 
The following separate presentations focused on the agreement process from the perspective of different partner projects. 

•	Vicki Reich gave an overview of the agreement process for CLOCKSS, a non-profit organization, providing long term access to scholarly publications in the “dark archive”.  Includes both libraries and publishers, operates with three different agreement types, and she emphasized there is 100% consensus and participation for all decisions by the Board. 

•	Julie Sweetkind-Singer of Stanford discussed the basic agreements used by National Geospatial Digital Archive (NGDA): the Content Provider agreements, the Content Collection Node agreement, and the Procedure Manual. 

•	Myron Guttmann, of the DATA Pass project of social science information, discussed the major questions to ask in producing agreements: what are the benefits, who can participate, what are the implications in terms of cost, resources, etc.  Based their agreements on those of other NDIIPP projects.  Also brought up the similar European effort, done with a grant from the EU, to build digital preservation infrastructure.

•	Dwayne Buttler of MetaArchive project, a lawyer who helped draft the agreements.  He said the concept of agreements is similar to “contracts” area of law.  The major question to answer is, “what do you need to accomplish?  Also, pointed out the dueling ideas of trust and lack of trust, that both help to drive the agreement process. He also talked about the “why” of agreements, as well as the advantages of having them; that they provide definitions, a degree of certainty, predictability, and clarification of issues involved. 

Panel B - Rowing in the Same Direction – Collaboration across Disparate Organizations 
This panel was presented as a series of topics relating to the PeDALS project (Persistent Digital Library and Archives System).  Each topic was addressed as a round robin of “lessons learned” specific to each panelist institution.   To start, there was an overview of the goals and current status of PeDALS, then panelists took turns relating their own experiences on various issues, including:

•	Communication challenges.  Due to the collaborative nature, some tools were adopted to help the process along (such as Basecamp).  It was determined that nothing takes the place of individual communication, particularly face to face, and general “getting to know” other colleagues involved.  They also addressed the challenges faced between technical staff and non-technical/archivist staff.  Some folks who have experience in both areas can act as “translators”.  

•	The differences in institutional culture.  For example, in some states, such as Arizona and Florida, the state archives and libraries are part of the same agency. With others, such as South Carolina, the two operations are in separate agencies.  These differences can also extend to IT (state level vs. agency level). 

•	Future sustainability of the project.  Some examples of how the NDIIPP project has had positive influence on state operations overall.  For example, New York and Wisconsin now catalog all archival e-records in conformance with PeDALS metadata