October 10, 1999
revised November 2
Overview
Most Significant Achievements
Strategic Planning
Advocacy
Other Program
Membership
Finance
Goals 2000
At the end of NINCH's third year, I believe we have created a strong base for our organizational and programmatic future.
In my mid-year report (NINCH in Play) , I argued that NINCH had already succeeded in creating:
Our work this year has focused on strategic planning for NINCH's future organizational, fiscal, membership and programmatic structures and on deploying our first set of practical projects.
At our mid-year May 6 meeting, the Board discussed and approved the strategic planning working group's first set of recommendations, regarding our organizational structure, and discussed four projects (the database of digital humanities projects; the Guide to Good Practice; the Copyright Town Meetings and Building Blocks). See the enclosed Director's Mid-Year Report ("NINCH in Play") and Board Meeting Report.
Through the strategic planning process developed by the strategic planning working group, we have built the basis for a long-term organizational infrastructure. This has included:
Through a process of defining community needs and using working groups drawn from across the community, we have developed our first set of specific, practical projects, some now funded, some partially funded and/or still before funders.
Since my mid-year report, the Best Practices Working Group has selected a consultant team to survey current practice and write a community-wide "Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials." Seamus Ross, director of the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute at the University of Glasgow, leads the selected team. A proposal with a funding request for $140,000 was submitted to the Getty Grant Program in July and we await an imminent decision.
The Rockefeller Foundation recently awarded NINCH a grant of $105,000 towards this ambitious project to assist humanities practitioners and computer and information scientists and technologists to work together in a national, concerted effort to build new digital tools and environments that will answer practitioners' intellectual needs. Twenty-four societies and associations, organized into seven fields of enquiry, have so far signed up. We have submitted funding proposals to the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller, Kress, Markle, Sloan and Mellon Foundations. We have met with The Getty Grant Program and the Rockefeller, Kress and Mellon Foundations. We will shortly be visiting the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. Mellon and Sloan have turned us down.
As the May 6 Report details, this year the executive committee approved a new mission statement, approved the pursuit of independent legal status for NINCH and had obtained clarification of the level of support from its principal sponsors for FY2000-2002. The board subsequently approved a new organizational structure:
The board also clarified the reporting structure and evaluation procedure for the executive director and determined he/she should have an employment contract once NINCH becomes an independent organization.
The Strategic Planning Working Group divided itself into three work groups to make recommendations and create work plans in the areas of financial structure, membership structure and development, and independence.
The financial structure group emphasized the importance of seeking a balance in NINCH's financial future between increased membership funding, project funding and core program funding from foundations. There was some discussion of creating alternate financial scenarios. The executive director created one planning budget for fiscal years 2000-2002 for core operations that included:
The financial structure group's recommendations and principles, that among other things call for a 6-month experiment to determine the likelihood of core funding from foundations, will need a similar advisory and planning group to enable the recommendations to be carried forward.
The membership group proposed a mixture of short-term and long-term strategies to meet the goals proposed by the three-year core planning budget. These include the organization of focus group sessions at member conferences that would be a give-and-take on NINCH membership: presenting NINCH's goals and programs in the light of specific organizations' or sectors' interests.
Pursuit of both short- and long-term goals will need the commitment of a membership working group.
The independence group, encouraging the executive director to pursue incorporation and 501(c)(3) status, began investigations into different scenarios for nonprofits to work within other nonprofits. This investigation is continuing.
The Advocacy Working Group pursued its own planning parallel to, and in consultation with, the Strategic Planning Working Group. A recent meeting of this working group reasserted the programmatic directions it recommended in its February 19 meeting:
The Mapping subset of the Advocacy Working Group has had a consultative meeting with Ben Davis, director of digital publishing at the J. Paul Getty Trust, and an early discussion with Paul Kahn of Dynamic Diagrams. The group will need to judge the likelihood of being able to form a task force to pursue this work this coming year.
Under Public Policy and Funding, conversations have continued with the Institute for Museum and Library Services about how NINCH could work more closely with that agency to make the case for greater funding for networked cultural heritage. At the working group's last meeting it was determined that our 1998 collection of "Best Examples" of digital practice (see <http://www.ninch.org/PROJECTS/Future/ bestexamples.html>) should be further developed by this group into an advocacy tool.
The Copyright Education and Development subset of this group, under the leadership of Kathe Albrecht, has organized the Copyright Town Meetings working group, which in turn is coordinating this second series of discussions and debates across the country. The series is planning to be launched in January 2000 at the Chicago Historical Society, followed by extended sessions at the conferences of the American Association of Museums, the College Art Association and the Visual Resources Association, and day-long sessions hosted by the Research Triangle Library Network and Syracuse University.
At its last meeting, the Advocacy Working Group heard a presentation from Rick Weingarten, director of ALA's Office of Information Technology Policy, about ALA's work in developing, distributing and processing its survey on the impact of the DMCA on fair use. This group has declared its interest in assessing ALA in the distribution of such a survey to our own communities.
Since May, the database working group met at the annual conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities to review progress on the prototype, the database structure, and work on the 110 records submitted by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The group discussed a range of revisions that are being implemented by library and cataloging staff at Rice University and the University of Michigan. (Report available at <http://www.ninch.org/PROJECTS/data/data.html>)
NINCH-Announce continues, with 500 direct subscribers and over 80,000 readers, including redistribution by lists serving the digital library, museum, scholarly and other audiences.
The NINCH website is due for an overhaul and for more focused attention (including professional re-design) this next year. The proposed "mapping" project, defined by the Advocacy Working Group, deploying latest web technologies to represent the digital activity of all NINCH members could be a boon here.
Two articles by the executive director were published during this past year: one reviewing NINCH's progress for the bi-monthly magazine of the Society of American Archivists; the other previewing NINCH's work on developing its "Guide to Good Practice," for the magazine of the Museum Computer Network.
I made an afternoon's presentation on "Promises & Challenges in Networking Cultural Heritage" at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in April and will be giving talks in October and November in Prague and Stockholm on NINCH's approach to gathering the cultural community together to build an action agenda. I also chaired five conference sessions during the year, three of which I had organized (at the 1998 Digital Resources in the Humanities conference, in Glasgow; the American Association of Museums conference in Cincinnati and at the International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting in Washington, DC. See Appendix.
By the end of FY 1999, NINCH had seventy-three members. There was no attrition during the year and we gained four members: the Association of American University Presses, the Center for Arts & Cultural Policy Studies, Princeton University and the libraries of Duke and North Carolina State Universities.
Perhaps the best news of the year was that the J. Paul Getty Trust had decided to continue the support of NINCH. The Getty Information Institute was one of the three original sponsors of NINCH. With the dissolution of GII this year, there was some uncertainty about the Getty's continuing role. Fortunately the Trust decided to continue the existing annual financial support, to encourage more interaction between all divisions of the Getty and NINCH and to play a part in advocating for NINCH in funding circles.
We are delighted that Kathleen McDonnell remains the Getty's representative in her new position as Special Assistant to the Executive Vice President of the J. Paul Getty Trust
Although final figures are not in for the month of September, I expect our annual expenses to amount to $146,000. We have taken in $146,000 in membership dues with another $10,000 to collect. We had a balance of $5,000 from last year. We still have the Kress award of $40,000 for the Copyright Town Meetings and have absorbed the start-up costs of the Best Practices project.