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Forwarded from the NINCH list.
Judy
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From: INTERNET:[log in to unmask], INTERNET:[log in to unmask]
To: Multiple recipients of list, INTERNET:[log in to unmask]
Date: 3/11/99 10:19 AM
RE: NINCH MEMBERS: February Director's Report
Dear Members:
Below is my report for February. For comments or corrections please e-mail
me directly at <mailto:[log in to unmask]>.
David
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NINCH MEMBERS BULLETIN
FEBRUARY 1999 DIRECTOR'S REPORT
1. International: Meeting with Scandinavian Librarians; GAAC
2. Cultural Funding Briefing
3. Meetings With IMLS
4. Meeting with Pat Harris/NISO
5. Los Angeles: Copyright Town Meeting
6. Los Angeles: College Art Association Conference
7. Los Angeles: Visual Resources Association Conference
8. Los Angeles: Judy Mitoma & Gloria Werner
9: Projects Update: Database & NEH; Carnegie Corporation Meeting
10: Strategic Planning
11: March Calendar
...........................................................................
1. INTERNATIONAL: SCANDINAVIAN LIBRARIANS; GERMAN AMERICAN ACADEMIC COUNCIL
Joan Lippincott (CNI) and I met with a group of 14 Scandinavian librarians,
February 1, in the U.S. for the January ALA. Most interested in our
programs was Kerstin Assarsson-Rizzi, head librarian of the Royal Academy
in Sweden, who has a good understanding of the U.S. situation. We agreed to
keep in touch.
In October 1997, the National Humanities Center hosted a meeting with the
German American Academic Council (GAAC) to outline a future exchange
program, involving resident scholarships at the Center, with a focus on
Information Technology and the Humanities. I attended as a representative
of the ACLS. The GAAC representatives were impressed by the NINCH
"Computing & the Humanities" Initiative and the report on our March 1997
Roundtable Meeting <http://www.acls.org/op41-toc.htm>, organized by NINCH,
CNI and the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. At the prompting
of NHC President, Bob Connor, Chuck Henry and I meet March 19 with GAAC
representative Elmar Mittler, University Librarian at Goettingen
University, to explore projects that could be fashioned between GAAC and
NINCH and its members.
2. CULTURAL FUNDING BRIEFING
February 3, I was invited to attend a press briefing at the Office of the
First Lady on the President's FY 2000 Cultural Funding Budget. Ellen
McCulloch-Lovell, Deputy Assistant to the President and Advisor to the
First Lady on the Millennium, introduced and hosted the event, emphasizing
the White House Millennium Council
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/Initiatives/Millennium/what.html>, its theme of
"Honor the Past -- Imagine the Future," and the Save American Treasures
initiative. L.G. Holstein, Interim Chief of the Office of Management &
Budget presented an overview of the proposed $1 billion White House culture
budget. Holstein mentioned the President's "Digital Library for Education,"
(proposing $10 million of new money to IMLS, $5 million each to the
National Park Service and the Smithsonian and $10 million to NSF for a
math/science 'library'), and the recent announcement by VP Gore of a Next
Generation Supercomputing Program that would include an avenue for civilian
use.
In brief reviews of current program by the heads of the endowments and
IMLS, information technology was not mentioned by William Ivey (NEA), was
briefly itemized by Bill Ferris (NEH) and was noted as a critical factor in
the future development of museums and libraries by Diane Frankel (IMLS).
Frankel specifically mentioned programs to enable larger, more
I.T.-experienced museums to coach smaller institutions and develop joint IT
programs with them and to develop museum-library joint technology programs.
3. MEETINGS WITH IMLS
In response to the President's budget proposing a new $10 million for IMLS
for funding digitization projects, I was invited to speak to Diane Frankel
and her staff, February 3, about issues to be considered in designing a
program, should it be funded. In addition, on February 8, I met with Mamie
Bittner (IMLS Director of Public & Legislative Affairs) to discuss ways
that NINCH could help develop arguments for such funding and suggest
people to give Congressional testimony. Diane Frankel will be testifying
March 18th. We plan to continue these meetings.
4. PAT HARRIS/NISO
February 17: a get-acquainted meeting with Patricia Harris, Executive
Director of the National Information Standards Organization
<http://www.niso.org>, which develops and promotes technical standards and
is co-organizer of a meeting on Technical Metadata Elements for Image Files
I'm attending April 18-19. During the meeting we covered:
* NISO's relationship with other standards organizations (notably the
American National Standards Institute, the National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST) <http://www.nist.gov/> and the Dept. of Commerce;
* NISO's work in developing z39.50 and the Digital Object Identifier and
NISO's new emphasis on gaining input from users, epecially through
developmental workshops;
* its recent Workshop on Linkage from Citations to Electronic Journal
Literature <http://www.niso.org/linkge.html> (examining possible solutions
to a range of complexities arising from an apparently simple activity);
* its recent White Paper on "Issues in Crosswalking Content Metadata
Standards" <http://www.niso.org/crsswalk.html> (on the need for the
metadata created and maintained in one standard to be accessible via
related content metadata standards); and
* its active publications program, including a new "Bookshelf" web feature
bringing together current important standards publications
<http://www.niso.org/pubnew.html#bookshelf>.
5. LOS ANGELES: COPYRIGHT TOWN MEETING Feb 11
Over 100 attended the Copyright Town Meeting I co-chaired at the College
Art Association's 1999 conference in Los Angeles, February 11. The meeting
was organized by NINCH & CAA to invite a broad range of questions for a
Copyright Primer under development by CAA. Panelists were Jeff Cunard,
CAA's legal counsel; Tyler Ochoa, Associate Professor at Whittier Law
School; and Martha Kendall Winnacker, Executive Assistant for Planning and
Policy Information Resources and Communications, University of California.
Panelists gave brief introductions (Martha Winnacker on Distance Education;
Tyler Ochoa on the Bridgeman v. Corel case (in which it was ruled that
"exact photographic reproductions" of public domain works of art were not
copyrightable) and Jeff Cunard on the practical implications of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act. The panel took ten questions from the audience,
many of which revolved around the Bridgeman case. A full report on the Town
Meeting will be available shortly. (Note: for more on the Bridgeman case
see "No Copyright for Art Photos Under Treaty," New York Law Journal
<http://www.nylj.com/stories/99/02/022499a3.htm>; Barry Szczesny also wrote
a piece on the implications for museums in the February AVISO Newsletter).
6. LOS ANGELES: COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION MEETING
Of the other CAA sessions I attended, the most interesting was
"Transmissions: Engineering Interfaces to Distributed Art and Theory." Of
the five papers, two are worth mentioning: a presentation on the Electronic
Book Review <http://www.altx.com/ebr> by editor Joseph Tabbi (English
Dept., Univ. of Illinois, Chicago) and designer Ann Burdick (CalArts),
which builds an electronic archive of writing that addresses the electronic
future of fiction, poetry, criticism, and the visual arts, where electronic
text and design work hand-in-hand; and "The Transmodern Derive: Drifting
Through Theory" by Marcos Novak of UCLA's Dept of Architecture and Urban
Design, that reworked the situationists' philosophy in thinking through the
practical aspects of designing new online spaces, such as navigable
spatialized databases. (A recent Marcos paper on cyber-space is available
as a response to the Walker Art Center's "Shock of the View" exhibit
<http://www.walkerart.org/salons/shockoftheview/space/sv_space_novak.html>).
7. LOS ANGELES: VISUAL RESOURCES ASSOCIATION
Occuring simultaneously with the CAA conference was the conference of the
Visual Resources Association. Highlights included the following six events:
i) A conversation between myself and the VRA Board and its new officers.
ii) "Changing World of Visual Resources: Where Will We Find Our Teaching
Images?" In this session, visual resources curator Kathe Albrecht spoke on
perceived barriers to using more digital images in educational institutions
(few image databases available; perceived high cost; resistance to digital
library licensing; different uses of images in teaching and for research;
and high cost of equipment for projecting digital images in the classroom);
Stephen Murray rehearsed his digital reconstruction of Amiens Cathedral as
a teaching device
<http://www.learn.columbia.edu/Mcahweb/index-frame.html>; and Thomas
Trabitsch spoke of the digitization project at the Kunsthistoriches Museum,
Vienna.
iii) "Copyright & Image Management," an excellent talk by Georgia Harper
(Office of General Counsel, University of Texas System) providing an
overview of how fair use and case law affect campus use of both analog and
digital images
<http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/image.htm>. Especially
effective was her use of a particular scenario on the audience. Telling was
her curiosity about how the cultural community *was* organizing itself,
post-CONFU (see, for example, my own article, "CONFU Continues? Is it Time
to Re-Group?" <http://www.ninch.org/News/CONFU_Report.html> from May 1997.)
iv) "Issues of Audience Access to Visual Materials." This was an extremely
interesting presentation from four divisions of the Getty Trust on how they
were broadening access to their own and others' collections:
--Louis Marchesano, curator at the Research Institute described an
ambitious plan to create links between its Photo Study Collection (2
million photographs, 60% not catalogued or indexed) its Special Collections
(manuscripts, rare books, rare photos, prints, and drawings from 15th to
20th centuries) and its Library;
--Julie Radoyce of the Conservation Institute spoke of its Visual Resource
Management project that started in 1994 to organize its 100,000 images
documenting conservation sites (with 1500 added each month). Now 75,000
slides are scanned (45,000 catalogued) and are available through a server
built by Luna Imaging. An internal website will be available this month
with plans for limited public access in the future.
--Erin Coburn of the Museum spoke of ArtAccess, a touch screen program that
enables the general public to take advantage of much of the information in
the Museum's new collections management system, offering guidance to works
in the collection both for those who know what they are looking for and
those that do not. This involved defining subjects for general audiences to
approach the collection (Science and Industry; Myth; The Natural World;
Religion; People and Occupations; How We Live). There are plans afoot to
bring this to the Web.
--Jim Bowers, of the Information Institute, spoke of the Faces of L.A.
project <http://www.facesla.org/home/home_fs.html>, a collaborative venture
with 22 organizations creating a virtual database of two-and-a-half million
images, sounds and texts. Bowers emphasized the approach of bringing many
different collections together into the same virtual space for different
audiences. The search engine combines results, using several different
methods simultaneously.
v) "Meeting the Research Needs of Scholars from CD to Web." From an
account of using student labor to construct a CD of the collection of
Oberlin College's art museum <http://www.oberlin.edu/allenart/CD-ROM.html>;
to Michael Ester's account of the comparative economics of producing and
distributing high-quality images with extensive metadata for researchers
(using his experience producing Luna Imaging's CD, "Frank Lloyd Wright:
Presentation and Conceptual Drawings"
<http://www.luna-imaging.com/publications3.html>; through the Getty's Ben
Davis emphasizing the continuing dynamic and complex interrelation between
content and design in the move from print to CD to the Web of the Getty's
publications; to an account of developing the electronic version of the
Grove Dictionary of Art, there was a sense of the inevitability of the move
from CD to the Web in publishing scholarly resources.
vi) Last, and perhaps most interesting, was the session: "Collaboration on
the Web: Digital Image Collections for Art and Architectural History." This
presented several perspectives on the possibilities for building
high-quality digital libraries of public domain images. Several examples of
either individual or consortial services were given as a lead-in to a
proposed broad new effort, the Art History Image Exchange, which would deal
with copyright-cleared or public-domain images to be used principally for
teaching. The proposed initial subject area would be in architecture. This
has been adopted as a project by the Digital Library Federation and
negotiations are underway with the College Art Association to define a role
for CAA in the development of the Image Exchange.
Other projects presented included the California State University Image
Consortium (building a library of copyright-cleared digital images with
metadata to support the teaching of the basic art history/architecture
survey course required on 23 campuses): Allan Kohl's Art Images for College
Teaching <http://www.mcad.edu/AICT/html/index.html>; Jeff Howe's Digital
Archive of American Architecture at Boston College
<http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/arch/>; and Mary Ann Sullivan's
"Digital Image Collection" of sculpture and architectural images at
Bluffton College, Ohio
<http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/index/index2.html>, most taken by
herself over 20 years. The main proponent for the Art History Image
Exchange has been Jeff Cohen at Bryn Mawr College. He has built a prototype
for the Society of Architectural Historians, the SAH Image Exchange, a
collection of public domain images of American architecture, 1850-99,
mentioned in more than one of four survey textbooks currently in print
<http://www.brynmawr.edu/Acads/Cities/imgb/nextone/main4.html>.
There was a particularly interesting discussion at the end, with David
Bearman suggesting a complementary role between the proposed Art History
Image Exchange and AMICO, in which they might work together on metadata and
distribution issues. Bearman stressed the delicacy of using museum-owned
images on a free "public domain" site, whcih made concentrating on
architectural images a good way to start.
8. LOS ANGELES: UCLA--JUDY MITOMA and GLORIA WERNER
While in Los Angeles for the CAA and VRA conferences, I met with Judy
Mitoma, recent chair of the Dept of World Arts & Culture (1992-1997) and
now director of the Center for Intercultural Performance and of the UCLA
National Dance/Media project. Mitoma came to my attention while I was
writing my article on moving images online ("Beyond Word and Image"
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july97/07green.html>) as a leader in both
developing the use of media by the dance world and being aware of the
urgency of its preservation. The Pew-funded Dance/Media project encourages
better dance documentation by offering training, research and leadership
activities (which include an annual leadership conference and a fellowship
program focusing on film, video and new media training. (See her quote at
the conclusion of my essay).
I am very interested in the work she is doing with dance and media that
actively includes computing. Working with her is Andrew Gordon, a young
computer scientist working on analyzing and retrieving images from
digitized videotape that can be integrated into education. His goal is to
develop an online video archive of dance performance, criticism, and advice
that could be used to support dance education programs.
Mitoma was especially interested in our "Building Blocks" project
<http://www.ninch.org/PROJECTS/Building/1.html> in determining the needs of
practitioners within specific academic fields as they work with their raw
materials, as a precursor to engaging computer scientists in providing the
tools and environments that will more closely serve those needs. Gloria
Werner, UCLA University Librarian also participated in this generative
meeting that produced a number of leads in tying together some conceptually
related but otherwise unconnected projects across campus. Mitoma should
prove a valuable resource for the Performance component of our Building
Blocks project.
9. PROJECTS UPDATE
* DATABASE: I met with George Farr and Helen Aguera at NEH about the
Endowment supplying us with data on its funded digital projects for the
last 3 years. This data should be delivered for further research and input
into our prototype by Rice and Michigan by mid-April.
* COMPUTER SCIENCE & THE HUMANITIES: Chuck Henry, Stan Katz and William
Wulf had a successful first meeting with Vartan Gregorian at the Carnegie
Corporation about his interest in this suite of projects, including the
Conference series and Building Blocks. While in Los Angeles, I met with
Jack Meyers at the Getty Grant program, who expressed interest in assisting
the Building Blocks proposal.
* BEST PRACTICES: the listserv discussion and website is proceeding
<http://www.ninch.org/PROJECTS/practice/index.html>. A conference call is
being scheduled for late March. Jack Meyers at the Getty is also interested
in receiving a proposal before July 1.
10. STRATEGIC PLANNING
The Advocacy Working Group met Feb 19; a combined report of the Advocacy
and Strategic Planning Working Groups is being considered by the Strategic
Planning Group in March for a March 24th conference call.
11. MARCH CALENDAR
March 10: Announcement of DLI-2 Grant winners expected
March 11-14: Museums & the Web conference, New Orleans
<http://www.archimuse.com/mw99/>
March 16: Meet with Hugo Paulisson from the Netherlands
March 18: Possible Best practice conference call
Diane Frankel Congressional testimony
March 19: Meet with Chuck Henry and Elmar Mittler (GAAC)
March 24: Strategic Planning Working Group COnference Call
March 26-27: NSF Workshop on Data Archival and Information Preservation
<http://cecssrv1.cecs.missouri.edu/NSFWorkshop/>
March 26-27: New Challenges for Scholarly Communication in the Digital Era:
Changing Roles and Expectations in the Academic Community
<http://www.arl.org/scomm/conf.html>
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David L. Green
Executive Director
NATIONAL INITIATIVE FOR A NETWORKED CULTURAL HERITAGE
21 Dupont Circle, NW
Washington DC 20036
<http://www.ninch.org>
[log in to unmask]
202/296-5346 202/872-0886 fax
