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By David Green - January 2001
David Green with an overview of the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH), a U.S.-based coalition of more than seventy organizations and institutions (representing libraries, archives, museums, universities, professional societies, publishers and contemporary arts groups) [1] created to ensure strong and informed leadership from the cultural community in the evolution of the digital environment. Part of NINCH’s purpose is to build a framework within which these different elements of the cultural community can collaborate to build an effective networked cultural heritage.
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Although in the early 1990s there were informal discussions among humanities scholars, curators, librarians and information technologists about how to collaborate in an electronic environment, it was the Clinton administration’s 1993 white paper, Agenda for Action, outlining the business and scientific requirements for a “National Information Infrastructure,” that galvanized the formation of NINCH. The white paper made no reference to any cultural agenda, and with no national cultural policy or Ministry of Culture to champion their cause (and in an environment in which the very existence of the National Endowments for the Arts & the Humanities, and even the Department of Education had been threatened), the cultural-educational community felt sidelined [2].
With immediate leadership provided by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS, under President Stanley Katz and Vice President Douglas Bennett), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI, under Paul Evan Peters and Joan Lippincott, serving librarians and information technologists) and the Getty Art History Information Program (under Eleanor Fink), NINCH was quickly conceptualized as the result of two twinned impulses, the professional (to develop a proactive strategy for integrating the use of computers in the arts and the humanities) and the political (to respond to the government’s challenge to articulate what the cultural sector needed out of the National Information Infrastructure).
ACLS, CNI & the Getty published a report, Humanities & Arts on the Information Superhighway, [3] which included a brief survey of current digital projects and a review of the challenges ahead, and issued a call to other national associations to join the movement. So on gaining sufficient support, NINCH opened its doors in March 1996.
NINCH’s work plan has developed in a fairly consistent way along three principal strategies: building community; creating an advocacy plan; and developing practical programs.
Our first charge was to build, very self-consciously, a sense of identity that would highlight common needs, capabilities and objectives. The chief instrument here was information exchange and education and consisted of:
As we were engaged in this early activity we were caught almost off-guard by the copyright wars and it was our engagement in intellectual property issues that crystallized the nature and character of our coalition, precipitating the statement of our core values.
The chief issue here was “fair use;” the exemption in the U.S. that enables scholars, teachers, critics and others to re-use copyrighted material in certain situations without seeking permission from copyright owners. As Congress prepared to update U.S. Copyright Law in the early 1990s, one green paper (influenced by commercial copyright owners) strongly suggested that in the digital age the “fair use” defense would have to go. A three-year-long process, known as the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU), was established to see whether the principal stakeholders in this issue could forge specific guidelines on fair use that could effectively replace the ambiguous “four factors” used by judges in court [5].
NINCH members do many things with cultural property: they create it, own it, protect, preserve, describe, organize, present, publish, study and teach it. Questions of ownership, guardianship, access, use, potential revenues and theft became hot buttons in the debate over the future of copyright online. While CONFU finally collapsed and attention turned to the fight to keep the fair use exemption in the rewrite of copyright law, NINCH came to a crossroads. Should it become an advocate for the strongest defense of fair use and for particular iterations of a revised copyright law (and thereby lose a few members), or should it create a platform on which debate and learning takes place?
We took the latter course. Emerging from this process it became critical to declare our core values: belief in the arts and humanities as vital to the health of society; belief that a network through which people in all walks of life gain meaningful access to global cultural heritage is a decided public good; and belief that we will advance such a goal through sharing ideas, resources, experience and research among all. Such a “Jeffersonian” call for all to learn from one another as well as the declaration of why this enterprise was so basic to our society proved to be extraordinarily invigorating: a good cornerstone for future growth.
In building our own identity we need also to build bridges to other critically important communities. Chief among these, I believe is information and computer science and technology. Early on in NINCH’s history, we designed a broad initiative, Computer Science and the Humanities, with the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Academies. This was launched in 1997 with a very productive roundtable discussion among computer scientists, humanities practitioners, funders and administrators that I’ll return to later in this paper.
In our first three years, we managed to create a space or framework that didn’t exist before. On this framework, the different parts of our community (the museums, archives, arts groups, libraries, scholars and others) can understand the broader landscape in which they operate. As one NINCH member put it: "NINCH has helped focus attention on the wide range of institutions that share common concerns and this visibility has helped us understand our own issues, others’ issues, and the wider context in which we operate."
The key to advocacy is vision. Part of the process of building an understanding of our common enterprise was developing a vision of what networked cultural heritage would look like.
What we envision is a sophisticated, dynamically integrated, digital exploratorium; a virtual, distributed collection of cultural heritage material that will enable an individual or team to create, enjoy or work with digital objects of all kinds, in all media. Widely accessible, easily usable and deeply searchable, by creators, scholars, the general public and by teachers and learners of all ages across the global information infrastructure, it will be of the highest possible quality and fidelity and be able to guarantee the authenticity and integrity of each digital object. It will enable new kinds of exploration, discovery and knowledge—about objects, cultures and ourselves. It will be a new kind of place — a library, a text, sound and moving-image archive, a museum, and a studio. The materials available will be incredibly diverse, ranging from prehistoric artifacts to digital immersive theater and new narrative forms; from medieval manuscripts and 1930s newsreels to virtual multi-dimensional, multimedia tours of medieval cathedrals, ancient archeological sites and cities as they age and grow through time. There might even be books.
The next step is to translate the vision: to educate ourselves, policymakers, and the public about the critical importance of our vision and about the challenges involved in achieving it. Our copyright experience taught us that advocacy would be an educational, not a legislative or hectoring activity [6]. And we believe we’ve had success in enabling members, sometimes with apparently entrenched positions, to understand a larger picture and realize that we’re all in this together.
Intellectual property issues clearly prevent our vision from becoming a reality. CONFU taught us that our community still needed a grounding in copyright basics. We joined others in organizing a series of Copyright Town Meetings in 1996-1997 to talk about these issues, bringing in legal experts and other practitioners and opening the floor to questions and debate.
The town meetings proved useful and popular. Recognizing that copyright issues will get increasingly complex and will directly involve more of us (artists, administrators, curators, teachers, students, faculty, and the public), we are committed to continuing copyright education in several forms, including the town meetings.
Beyond copyright, we are building our capacity to influence public policy (including widening funding streams) by developing a greater capacity to understand and articulate our needs and achievements. One early step was our collecting “Best Examples” [7] of the community’s achievements to date and the best arguments about the value of this work. We are also building a capacity to prepare white papers on key issues to educate our members and policymakers
A longer-term goal is to apply advanced web-based technology to map in multi-dimensional forms the activity and achievements of the cultural heritage community in networking materials. We are also considering forms of graphical representation of the concepts and issues we advocate. What would a resource-rich information environment look like?
As a result of our community-building and advocacy efforts, we have now assembled a program for action that we believe responds to urgent current needs and explores new models for social, economic and technical solutions to the problems of effectively networking cultural heritage. Each of these programs depends on a NINCH working group for its progress and development. Indeed most of our work is accomplished through its staff working with members organized into working groups. Groups either accomplish their assigned tasks themselves or create a funding proposals for work to be done by member organizations or other consultants. All working groups are authorized by the board; they report periodically to the board and all of their recommendations are considered for approval by the board.
Arts and humanities computing has since its inception been hampered by the lack of an adequate means for collecting and publishing information about activity in the field. Its interdisciplinary scope and methodological nature, coupled with rapid technological change, have so far thwarted the development of a practical bibliography of ongoing work. The lack of such a tool has been repeatedly and urgently noted by researchers, administrators and funding agencies, all of whom need to know what work is being done by whom and how it can be used by others.
A NINCH working group and an advisory group, which include many directors of humanities computing centers on university campuses in the U.S. and abroad, is designing and constructing an international distributed database of digital humanities projects whose goal is to provide regularly updated, peer-reviewed "deep data" on current projects and works in progress. It has been designed primarily for those creating digital resources so that they can avoid duplication of effort, be encouraged to collaborate and share information on methodology and software and to serve as an information and policy-building resource for funders. We've designed a Dublin Core-based database structure; the National Endowment for the Humanities has delivered 110 records of digital projects it has funded over the past three years; and the University of Michigan and Rice University have each donated catalogers and library staff to produce a working prototype.
As many cultural and educational institutions (and also many individual faculty) go about digitizing material for teaching, research, and even preservation, what ground rules do they have, what questions do they ask themselves, which information and technical standards are they aware of? How can those working in museums, libraries, archives, arts institutions, universities, colleges, or in their own studies or studios learn from others working in different sectors? How can they break institutional barriers in thinking through the wide range of potential uses and users of their materials?
These and other questions were behind the formation, in January 1999, of the NINCH Working Group on Best Practices to produce a Guide to Good Practice, taking advantage of the wide-ranging expertise represented in NINCH membership of all types of cultural resources from all kinds of cultural institutions. The Working Group agreed on an approach emphasizing community-wide guiding principles for the creation, capture and management of networked resources combined with "hands-on" expertise developed in exemplary practice and projects. They agreed that there is also a need for a map of where the lacunae are: areas for which good practice still needs to be developed, assessed and documented.
Thus the working group drew up a set of core principles that it believed should govern the creation of digital cultural heritage resources. Good practice would thus:
After issuing an RFP, the working group contracted with the Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute (HATII) of the University of Glasgow. The HATII team will conduct a survey of the field to discover and define exemplary practice and write the Guide, under the direction of, and in close cooperation with, the NINCH Working Group. The survey will include interviews with practitioners and reviews of published guidelines and projects that demonstrate good practice.
The NINCH Guide will be a significantly different kind of publication than any that currently exists. First it will cut across all types of material, all sectors of the cultural community, all academic disciplines and all institution types. It is designed to be a unifying guide with a primary focus on resource types (text, images, moving images, etc.). Second, it will be based on an extensive survey of current practice in order to create a rich knowledge base of success and failure of different approaches. Third, it will be an eminently practical guide, a handbook for practitioners "at the coal face." Working Group and consultants agree that a Socratic decision-tree structure will be an essential navigational device of this Guide. It will ask a practitioner with a given resource a set of questions at each decision point in the long process of digitizing and managing cultural resources, guiding them through the process and pointing to the best available set of tools that currently exist to help in the decisions that have to be taken.
NINCH is collaborating with the Council on Library & Information Resources (CLIR) in organizing a small invitational conference (February 15-16, 2001) for 40 leaders in the library, museum, business, higher education, and legal communities to examine new business models emerging as museums and libraries, separately and together, assemble digital, online collections. The conference builds on "Collections, Content & the Web," organized by CLIR with the Chicago Historical Society in October 1999 to discuss issues relating to museums and libraries online [9].
Six directors will discuss the history and evolution of their institutions/projects, focusing on the business models adopted and the special challenges they face. Examples will include JSTOR, Highwire Press, Questia, the partnership between the George Eastman House and the International Center for Photography, the Art Museum Network and Fathom.com. Other institutional/project directors, as well as legal, financial and technical experts will then respond to the presentations. Moderated discussion on the second day will then examine how considerations about sustainability affect critical decisions about: what is put online and for whom; how to manage rights when providing access to and preserving digital assets; what technological opportunities and constraints are confronted; how to market the services to potential investors and users; how to gain support from the home institutional governing bodies; and what impacts these decisions have on institutional staffing and budget.
There will be a published report on the conversations and the most promising models. We expect to pursue the development of a research agenda that will stimulate practical collaborative projects and outline what information and research is still needed. We see this as a companion project both to our "Guide to Good Practice" (what makes a good business plan? what effect will certain decisions have?) and to our Computer Science & the Humanities projects.
With a knowledge of who is doing what; of what the best practices are in networking cultural heritage; and of how copyright can help (or hinder) us in broadening access to that heritage, perhaps the greatest problem we have to face, as we create a networked cultural heritage, is determining the longer-term needs of the cultural community. How do we go about developing the digital tools--the software and the environments--that are shaped by, and respond to, the ways of working and the ways of thinking of those engaged in creating, preserving, researching and teaching cultural resources?
Recognizing that early applications of computing technology were driven by business and technical needs, we are increasingly aware that newer kinds of applications arising in the arts and humanities create and use knowledge in different ways than conventional applications. Although some conventional technology may transfer well to the arts and humanities, we are at the point where it makes sense to develop technology that serves those needs better and more explicitly.
With the 1997 Roundtable on Computer Science and the Humanities organized with the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), we established the ground for research into how computer scientists and humanists could work together for their mutual benefit. William Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering and co-chair of the 1997 Roundtable, has since testified in Congress that the humanities will present the biggest and best problems for computer science and information technology into this new century.
Humanists need to take the lead to guarantee that intellectual needs shape technical solutions. However, the first step is to articulate those needs in order to form the basis for generative collaboration with computer and information scientists and technologists. Building Blocks was the first component of the Computer Science and Humanities Initiative. Funded by the Rockefeller, Delmas and National Science Foundations, NINCH worked with the representatives of 26 scholarly and professional societies to bring together 90 humanists organized into five fields (History, Interdisciplinary Studies, Language & Literature, Performing Arts, and Visual & Media Studies) . The three main objectives of the workshop (held September 20-24, 2000) were:
1.How We Work: to review and critically evaluate, by field, current scholarly and pedagogical practice, with particular attention to the use of primary source materials (using the 250 returns to a questionnaire, "Working With Materials,");
2.What Do We Need: to articulate by field and across disciplines the most pressing needs in the humanities that networked computing could address;
3.Where Do We Go From Here? to outline short-term, practical, collaborative projects; and to outline areas to be potentially included on a longer-term research agenda to be developed with computer scientists.
The format of the meeting interwove three panel presentations of topical issues (Possibilities of Digital Media; New Models of Publication/Dissemination; Interactivity & Visualization); cross-disciplinary discussions of the implications of the presentations; and discipline-based discussions.
For many, the core of the meeting was the set of intensive discussions in discipline-based "field meetings," where the state and needs of a given field were debated by scholars and teachers alongside librarians, archivists, curators, publishers and others. Participants, selected by representatives of societies and displaying a great diversity of backgrounds and approaches, discovered both fruitful similarities (common values and methodologies that became firm foundations for creating short-term project proposals) and differences (the value of particular expertise and specialties) that served to energize the process.
The workshop was an extraordinary success. In the words of just one of many enthusiastic testimonials to the quality of conversation and achieved results: "This was one of the most invigorating and worthwhile workshops I've ever been part of....Every other participant I spoke with agreed that it was a truly significant gathering for the humanities and for scholarship online.” More than 20 project proposals are now being developed (from drafts produced at the meeting). Each project has its own team (typically a university-based center, a number of scholarly societies and selected consultants) that is developing the proposal to be submitted by a lead team-member, under the aegis of the Building Blocks Steering Committee.
Beyond the "short-term" (projects to be developed in the next 2-4 years), the workshop participants made first iterations of statements of the issues and problems that needed to be further developed, over the long term, with computer scientists. The most likely forum for the creation and implementation of this research agenda will be a series of three annual conferences on Computer Science & the Humanities to begin in the fall of 2001 [10].
This conference series, funded by the Carnegie Corporation, will convene distinguished achievers in humanities computing with computer scientists, funders and policymakers. Best examples of recent work will be presented alongside many varied opportunities to extend the conversations of the 1997 Roundtable.
The conference will allow participants to demonstrate exemplary applications of technology in the humanities and relevant applications in the computer sciences; to link discussions between disciplines; and generally to create new opportunities for peer learning from a variety of formats, including formal presentations, project reviews, and interactive sessions focusing on new tools. Using these means, the goals of the conference series will include:
This is the current range and ambition of our developing coalition. The lessons we are learning might be reduced to the following guidelines for ourselves and for others outside the coalition:
Finally, congruent with NINCH’s Core Values statement is the assertion that the computer and networking systems are clearly tools to be used for a greater end. Children of Marshall McLuhan, we understand that these tools act as extensions of our own nervous system and can radically modify our perceptions, but it is still critical to emphasize that these digital tools are only our instruments and need constant re-invention and re-thinking, according to our own statement of needs. The cultural community needs to be setting the agendas: intellectual needs must shape technical solutions.
did contain a chapter on "Arts, Humanities and Culture on the
NII, URL: <http://nii.nist.gov/pubs/sp868/arts.html>
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David L. Green
Executive Director
National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage
21 Dupont Circle, NW
Washington DC 20036
david@ninch.org
<http://www.ninch.org>
Phone: 202/296-5346
Fax: 202/872-0886
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For citation purposes:
Green, D. L. "The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage: Intellectual Needs Shaping Technical Solutions", Cultivate Interactive, issue
3, 29 January 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/ninch/>
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