As part of the IMLS grant we have to submit a digital products data management plan. As a team, we have not discussed such a plan in any specific detail, and I have never actually had to create such a plan without strong institutional support (meaning someone else always had the answers for me). I think everyone on the team should take a look at the document (at least the questions being asked) just so you are informed about the current state of digital data management in the museum field.
I’ve asked Lana to chime in with any help she can offer to the completion of the form. I would also ask if any of you have experience or suggestions for it, please let me know. You can update the form (Specificationsdigital) on dropbox and post your comments here.
I’m going to attempt to embed the document below.
developingele 
Ok, done here. Do you need anything else from us?
Obviously we’ll need some sort of learning module on Creative Commons, right? Do we (or NMAH?) need to create some sort of legal document that submitting institutions will fill out showing that everything they’re uploading is legal?
I think Creative Commons should be a subset of the copyright learning module. In my opinion, the copyright learning module should have two branches: 1) how to use (legally) material where someone else holds the copyright; this would include discussions on public domain & education fair use; the other branch 2) would show how to protect (copyright) the intellectual property of materials you or your museum produce. Creative Commons is emerging as a way to share content more freely in the digital world, but by no means is it the only way.
I suggest it for us because there is limited commercial (profit) value in the materials we are producing.
The need for a legal document is an interesting question. My guess is that if all the local exhibits are hosted on non-SI servers (that ELE just links to them), we don’t have any legal responsibility. But I am not licensed to practice law and cannot dispense legal advice. It would probably be a good idea for Peter & his team to include a check box on the “Requirements for posting on the NMAH site” document that says something to the effect that all copyright permissions are in compliance.
I can offer a little advice for how we managed some of our data with CCTH. We saved all images as both TIFs (master copies) and JPEGs (access copies), and we aimed at 1200dpi (though often we lowered our resolution to 600dpi because the files become massive). I’m not sure what the standard archival quality for image resolution currently is (maybe Katharine knows?). All of our interviews were saved as MPEGs. At the end of the project, we backed up all of our images, oral history interviews, and metadata on a tera external harddrive as well as archival quality CDs. Perhaps the Folklife Resource Center might be a good repository for the collection once the project is finished. I also have the original agreement forms we used for oral histories and images if that would be helpful. I worry about how our metadata will be backed up- does Omeka have an easy way to do this?