Posted by Marlene Gordon
NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT
News on Networking Cultural Heritage Resources
from across the Community
October 3, 2000
For further information
contact David Green
202-296-5346
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GETTY TRUST FUNDS INNOVATIVE SURVEY & "GUIDE TO GOOD PRACTICE"
- Guide To Cover Entire Community -
NINCH Working Group Selects Glasgow University's
Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute
Guide to be Published Fall 2001
The J. Paul Getty Trust has announced the award of $140,000 to the
National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH) to direct
an innovative project to review and evaluate current practice in the
digital networking of cultural heritage resources. NINCH will
subsequently publish a Guide to Good Practice in the Digital
Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials in print
and electronic form.
The Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute (HATII) of
Glasgow University, Scotland, has been selected to conduct a survey of
current practice in the cultural heritage sector and write the Guide, in
close co-operation with the NINCH Working Group on Best Practices. A
critical component of the Guide will be a report on a survey of current
practice. The survey is due for completion in March 2001; the final
draft of the Guide is due for completion in June 2001; publication is
expected to be in Fall 2001.
BACKGROUND
The 1999 IFLA/UNESCO report on its "Survey on Digitization &
Preservation," noted "the complete lack of consistency" among survey
respondents in how they prepared for and undertook digitization of
heritage materials. As many cultural 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?
NINCH WORKING GROUP ON BEST PRACTICE
These and other questions were behind the formation of the Working Group
on Best Practices by the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural
Heritage in January 1999. The Working Group (members listed below)
agreed on an approach emphasizing principles by extracting generalizable
issues from existing documented practice.
One of the biggest challenges for the cultural community is not in
developing or even adopting technical or information standards. Rather,
it lies in translating and crafting them to a set of practices, governed
by principles, that are shared and widely deployed across a community.
The goal of the Guide is to create a standard "vocabulary" that can be
used to read new iterations of specifications in any particular genre or
field. We will not address specific audiences but will aim to produce a
generalizable, universal document in which specific concerns or
instances could be mapped, using a branching structure.
WHY GOOD PRACTICE?
By adopting community wide shared good practice, project designers will
be able to ensure the broadest use of their projects, now and in the
future, even by audiences undreamed of by the designers. They will be
able to ensure the quality, consistency and reliability of the
information contained in their digital resources. They will be able to
ensure the compatibility of their resources with other resources from
other projects and from other domains. They will be able to build on the
work of others to produce digital resources most economically and
maintain and manage them into the future with maximum cost benefit.
Overall, "best practices" can be measured by their ability to maximize a
resource's intended usefulness while minimizing the cost of its creation
and subsequent management and use.
PRINCIPLES
The Working Group drew up a set of core principles that it believes
should govern the creation of digital cultural heritage resources:
1. OPTIMIZE INTEROPERABILITY OF MATERIALS
Digitization projects should enable the optimal interoperability between
source materials from different repositories or digitization projects
2. ENABLE BROADEST USE
Projects should enable multiple and diverse uses of material by multiple
and diverse audiences.
3. ADDRESS THE NEED FOR THE PRESERVATION OF ORIGINAL MATERIALS
Projects should incorporate procedures to address the preservation of
original materials.
4. INDICATE STRATEGY FOR LIFE-CYCLE MANAGEMENT OF DIGITAL RESOURCES
Projects should plan for the life-cycle management of digital resources.
5. INVESTIGATE AND DECLARE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY & RIGHTS OWNERSHIP
Ownership and rights issues need to be investigated before digitization
commences and findings reported to users.
6. ARTICULATE INTENT AND DECLARE METHODOLOGY
All relevant methods, perspectives and assumptions used by project staff
should be clarified and made explicit.
>From these principles a set of evaluative criteria were derived by which
to measure current practice (see:
<http://www.ninch.org/PROJECTS/practice/criteria-1.html>)
SURVEY
Following an RFP issued by the NINCH Working Group on June 1 1999, NINCH
has now contracted with the Humanities Advanced Technology & Information
Institute (HATII) of the University of Glasgow to 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; it
should also reveal areas for which good practice still needs to be
developed and documented. An initial small survey will test the
face-to-face, telephone and mail survey instruments and allow for
modification of the Working Group's Principles and the Evaluative
Criteria. This will be followed by an extensive (though not
comprehensive) survey of a wide range of production sites in the US and
of a select few in Europe.
Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute (HATII)
<http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk/>
Founded in 1997, HATII enables teaching and research by Glasgow
University Faculty in the Arts through the deployment of information and
communications technology and also engages in an active research agenda
of its own. Headed by Dr. Seamus Ross, HATII has conducted a number of
important evaluative studies of the use of digital technologies in the
cultural heritage sector. It has expertise not only in the full range of
media (text, image, moving image, sound) but also with different
institution types (universities, museums, archives and libraries). In
1997, HATII conducted an extensive review of the use of information and
communications technology in the heritage sector and produced a suite of
guidelines and recommendations for the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).
These included guidelines for applicants for funding and strategies for
the HLF to apply to assess, monitor and review the impact of
technology-based heritage projects.
NINCH Working Group on Best Practices
Kathe Albrecht (from May 24, 1999)
American University/Visual Resources Association
Lee Ellen Friedland
Library of Congress
Peter Hirtle
Cornell University
Lorna Hughes
New York University
Kathy Jones
Divinity School, Harvard University/American Association of Museums
Mark Kornbluh
H-Net; Michigan State University
Joan Lippincott
Coalition for Networked Information
Michael Neuman
Georgetown University
Richard Rinehart
Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives/Museum Computer Network
Thornton Staples
National Museum of American Art (through 2/1/99)
University of Virginia Library (from 2/1/99)
Jennifer Trant (through May 24, 1999)
Art Museum Image Consortium
Don Waters/Rebecca Graham (through May 24, 1999)
Digital Library Federation
The Getty Trust
The J. Paul Getty Trust is an international cultural and philanthropic
institution devoted to the visual arts and humanities, and includes an
art museum, as well as programs for education, scholarship, and
conservation.
The mission of the Getty Grant Program is to strengthen the fields in
which the Getty is active by funding exceptional projects undertaken by
individuals and organizations throughout the world.
NINCH
The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH) is a
diverse coalition of organizations created to assure leadership from the
cultural community in the evolution of the digital environment through
education on critical issues and developments, the sharing of resources,
experience and research, and the creation of a framework to develop and
advance collaborative projects, programs and partnerships. NINCH members
include organizations and institutions representing museums, libraries,
archives, the contemporary arts, learned societies, scholars, teachers
and others active in the cultural community. NINCH was formed to help
shape a digital environment through intensive collaborative discussion
and thoughtful action of its constituent members.
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