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 in the context of the sorts of things outlined in Thursday's Report ):

Need dynamic way to add to dimensions of a database

Need a way for users to give back into the system

Need to identify who the users are

Funding for fellowships for "technology sabbatical" to work together on information building.

Need a metadata agency or server of (art) object data

Software as simple as a light table that actually interfaces with real archives/libraries

Dissonance about what the base of technical knowledge among humanists is e.g. tagging for content - needing tools that the humanists themselves can use

What we do have to learn how to do is speak and communicate with technologists, we need to address a larger scope of media literacy for all humanists

Tools for analyzing online materials

Need for more nuanced search engines

Need "boundless" database of objects, on the top of which faculty and curators can build other projects

Need to bring people together to map out the pieces that are already out there and to see where the gaps are

Need work on dynamic categorizing

[Are the tools developed at Princeton or Maryland (ISIS) exportable to others. Would they use them if these institutions were given the resources to develop and disseminate them?]

Need to build auxiliary lists (like Getty's) that can assist a user with intelligent searching.

Lists could be like thesauri or other lists of pre-correlated terms.

University recognition of graduate student work in this domain (leading the pack). NINCH might recognize graduate students and bring more of them into the process. IP is a serious issue; faculty are afraid administrators are driven by $'s

Need to figure out how to encourage such human intangibles (energy that comes from recognition, respect, use of sight, feeling like part of a community, etc.) since they are powerful motivators----make us want to contribute

Need to have a way for supplier sites to offer scholarly exchange and record it

Access to technical expertise is an ongoing problem

Authorship question coming up for curators who do identifications and some research work. This becomes more important if other sites start to point to (quote) their work.

One possible model (shared by Howard): A global distributed scholarly database. Repositories hold the stable information and a second component of scholarly attributions--the fuzzy edges beyond the borders of the repository itself. This is possible with the right standards--pointing to objects works if the repository is sufficiently robust. Pieces of this exist. But a specific NINCH proposal would be to get people together to map out what pieces can be used and how to knit them together. The ideal is searching across many archives and acquiring tools to look at results together. As with the ISIS light table software. Starting point is cultural heritage material--humanities material broadly defined. As part of projects strategizing, we should try to articulate how we might start to collaborate--two-way flow of information, a true conversation