|
1. Concept of Networking Cultural Heritage How familiar is your organization and its constituents with the terms of this vision and with the current issues that have to be grappled with to make this vision a reality? Somewhat |
|
2a Given this definition of advocacy, how does your organization advocate for networking cultural heritage? Thus far our efforts -- especially education and promotion of interchange standards -- do not constitute advocacy in the political sense, though they have certainly moved our community and its beneficiaries in a direction congruent with that of NINCH. |
|
2b Do you have a different working definition of advocacy than the one we offer here? Our practice has been narrower in focus but similar in giving "voice to a cause and point of view developed from expertise and understanding." While promoting the mounting of any form of linguistic corpora or humanistic texts on the Internet, we have encouraged developers to avoid the opposite extremes of plain ASCII and proprietary formats and to adopt encodings (especially SGML but also HTML) that permit easy transmission and interoperability as well as promoting sophisticated retrieval and manipulation. The recently announced XML (Extensible Markup Language) -- a bridge between the format-oriented HTML and the more robust, structure-oriented SGML -- is likely to become a standard that our organization will support, publicize, and promote. |
|
2c Projects? Of the projects that your organization participates in, which are related to digital networking? The Text Encoding Initiative (as a standard for interchange of texts), Humanist Discussion Group (for exploration of issues related to humanities computing), and more recently the movement toward online scholarly materials, both via Kluwer (the publisher of our journal, Computers and the Humanties) and via a proposed resource for electronic pre-prints, post-prints, position papers, etc. |
|
2d Partners? If you collaborate with partners in any networking advocacy activity, who are they? The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computational Linguistics have both co-sponsored and helped to develop the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative. |
|
2e Measure Success? How do you measure the success of your networking advocacy projects? We have tended to view the success of the efforts (noted above) in terms of the number of projects that adopt the standards we promote, the number of resources to which our community has access, and the sophistication of the methodologies that the available resources and tools make possible |
|
2f Target? Besides NINCH members, what groups should NINCH target for advocacy? Groups that participate in the Coalition for Networked Information and library groups, especially those most closely affiliated with ARL, are likely to become supporters of the NINCH effort. Other kindred spirits will be found at AECT (Association for Educational Communication and Technology). Those who need to be educated by NINCH, besides our legislators, include the executives of the one hundred corporations meeting this weekend (May 8-10, 1997) at Microsoft for a retreat on the future of technology. |
|
Once the issues in #4 below are fleshed out and prioritized, the Executive Council of ACH could select issues and propose activities for presentation to our membership. Understanding will come quickly, endorsement is likely, and participation by ACH (formally) and by its members (individually) in NINCH activities would be a welcome development. Issues on intellectual property rights are likely to be of great interest to our membership, including issues on the rights and responsibilities of those who develop or enhance electronic resources by means of materials in the public domain.
|
|
3 --intellectual property (copyright law, fair use, licensing) 2 --standards (vocabulary/description/data; cataloging; technical, etc.) In the words of an executive at Disney Imagineering, a document needs to know about itself and about me. Metadata that lends itself to auto-selection according to user profiles are what's called for here. 4 --access (with appropriate tools, i.e., means of retrieval, manipulation, analysis) 6 --economics 5 --internationalism, in terms of the content of resources and also the means of dissemination 7 --preservation (though not at the expense of access) 1 --other: Education and training: how to use tools and methodologies for research and teaching with (and not just access to) the resources whose development is promoted by NINCH.
|
Back to Index of Organizations