Today's sessions focused on the questions of needs and vision: what do we need to work the way we want to work? This report simply lists many of the things we discussed (to be read n the context of the sorts of things outlined in Report #1):

Interdisciplinary Studies entered Friday's Field Meetings having identified three areas of concern: collections of digital materials, means of accessing them, and the skills to build more of them.

Resources

We would like to increase the world's digital store, but we are unclear on how to do this. We discussed the possibility of identifying a type of material-- legal codes or historic data sets, for instance-- and mounting projects to digitize them for various world areas. We also took a step back from the sources themselves and considered digitizing existing finding aids that humanities scholars know so well in paper. Two promising models emerged: funding projects in areas outside the First World to digitize resources (this would have the advantage of developing expertise and of lower labor costs in areas of greater language expertise); encouraging scholars who have identified resources of value for research, but too narrowly focused for paper publication, to digitize them and make them available over the WWW.

Access

This seemed a more likely candidate for deliberation, given that it narrowed differences of opinion on the wide variety of subject matter inherent in the resources discussion and that it seemed to present a technical problem that might prove challenging to computer scientists. We shared the vision of access as 1)discovery, i.e., finding what's out there, and 2)contextualization, i.e., assembling a corpus of materials that is neither too broad nor too narrow for use.

Again, we identified several models. We agreed that for the time being, the portal sites, LANIC was represented at the table, offered the best view of the Web. Throughout the discussions, enhancing these sites with additional funding and programming expertise had its advocates. We also learned of a collaboration between a research library, a university press and a scholarly society for digital publication in rural studies. This theme of collaboration had a great deal of purchase for the group. It seemed to offer a cost effective and inclusive vision, one that would be attractive to the various scholarly societies we represent.

Skills

Committee members had some considerable experience in building and maintaining digital projects. Based on their work and what we gleaned from the excellent sessions at the workshop, we agreed to recommend a center for the development of digital skills and for the meeting of humanist and technologists.

At the end of the day our concerns for multilingual, multimedia, interdisciplinary and multileveled (e.g., k-12) constituencies concentrated our attention on the topic of access. There was still a great difference of opinion on how to deal with the creation of digital resources, how to preserve them and how to handle issues of intellectual property. However, we felt that a project that identified a set of common themes in locating and collocating digital resources would serve as a clear, relevant focus for interdisciplinary studies. We also agreed that something needed to be done to facilitate collaboration between humanities scholars and technologists.