International Strategic & Policy Issues in Networking Digital Resources in the Humanities

Introduction

This session will engage the audience in a discussion of strategic issues for implementing an integrated digital environment for the humanities. While emphasizing the overview or big picture of developments as a whole, the session will be keyed to specific initiatives as examples for envisioning the future. A key component to each of the presentations will be the international extensibility of models, strategies and practices.

The essential challenge for all of those engaged in networking cultural heritage is to create a system that is deeply useful through the integration and management of multiple approaches and rich divergence across a very broad sector, while creating a network in which “intellectual needs shape technical solutions.”

The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH) is a diverse coalition of over 90 organizations--based in the United States although with international membership--created to assure leadership from the cultural community in the evolution of the digital environment. Over the last 5 years, NINCH has established a large body of work in support of this goal, including initiatives in the following areas:

* Educating policymakers, the cultural community and the public about the critical importance of translating the vision of a connected, distributed and accessible collection of cultural knowledge into a working reality;
* Creating a platform for the community to collaborate in sharing our ideas, resources, experience and research, learning from each other in order to advance the goal of an integrated, distributed body of cultural material accessible to all; and
* Providing a framework to develop and advance projects, programs and partnerships to benefit the cultural community.

NINCH has identified many challenges and opportunities facing institutions involved in creating a network of cultural heritage organizations for the digital age. Museums, libraries, archives, academic institutions and organizations representing the arts in all media are all involved in developing strategies that will help create a sustainable, long-term digital infrastructure.

Panelists in this session will represent organizations that have worked with NINCH in pursuit of this goal, and who will share their experience in developing common goals and achievements and identifying strategies for museums, archives, libraries and academic institutions. This session is co-sponsored by NINCH and NYU. NYU as an organization has worked closely with NINCH on a number of initiatives over the last 4 years, and this session will examine ways that working collaboratively with NINCH has facilitated the integration of technology in the Humanities at NYU.

There are many interconnected factors to be included in any strategic plan for creating an integrated digital environment for the humanities. We indeed to address the following issues during this presentation:

1. Advocacy & Public Policy/An Introduction to NINCH: the First Five Years
Speaker: David Green, Executive Director, NINCH
An overview of strategies developed to date for engaging a very broad community with different perspectives and work practices in developing a common agenda. How is this extensible internationally? What are the public policy issues here, for one country and across countries, and how important are they? Which advocacy tools are needed to educate funders and others about our needs? What examples are there for gathering and presenting best examples of our collective work to date?

2. New Operating/Business Models
Speaker: Stan Katz, Princeton
Research, development and implementation of necessary institutional change is crucial, but how do we best do it, from implementing new technology infrastructure to developing new roles and new operating/business models across universities, libraries, archives, museums and arts and media centers?
This presentation will refer to a joint inititative developed by NINCH and CLIR to address some of these challenges facing organizations, and an exploration of the strategies they need to develop in order to create, use and share long term, sustainable digital resources

3. Computer Science and the Humanities
Speaker: Chuck Henry, Rice University
Developing with computer and information scientists radically new kinds of tools and environments for and by scholars, teachers, curators and artists that respond to their needs and ways of working. Humanists need to take the lead in ensuring that “intellectual needs shape technical solutions.”
This presentation will be an overview of the NINCH project to determine what the humanities should be doing to take a more activist and thoughtful role in using and creating computing technology. This work would ultimately be able to contribute to the creation of what might be called an "Humanities Informatics," a study of how the humanities create and use knowledge, that could itself be part of a needed study of the broader history, philosophy and sociology of the arts and humanities, which, unlike the sciences, it has never had.