Forwarded from the NINCH list.

"David L. Green" <[log in to unmask]> 10/04/00 11:50AM 
NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT
News on Networking Cultural Heritage Resources
from across the Community
October 3, 2000

For further information
contact David Green
202-296-5346
[log in to unmask] 

A NINCH PROJECT

     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.

NINCH-Announce is an announcement listserv, produced by the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH). The subjects of announcements are not the projects of NINCH, unless otherwise noted; neither does NINCH necessarily endorse the subjects of announcements. We attempt to credit all re-distributed news and announcements and appreciate reciprocal credit.

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