>> Articles BEST PRACTICES IN NETWORKING CULTURAL HERITAGE RESOURCES: WHERE TO START? By David Green Unedited version of article to appear in Winter issue of Museum Computer Network's Spectra It is now de rigueur amongst cutting-edge information and knowledge specialists that we need to live by good (as well as high) standards. We have all suffered the joke about the rising popularity of standards as evidenced by their number and ubiquity. (See the UK's Arts and Humanities Data Service's useful collection of all known and applicable standards bodies and standards information resources, "Standards for Digital Information Interchange. A Resources Page."). But of course the biggest challenge is not developing or even adopting technical or information standards it is in translating and crafting them to a set of practices, governed by principles, shared and widely used across a community. Such practices would be measured by their ability to "maximise a resource's intended usefulness while minimising the cost of its creation and subsequent management and use." In many areas now we have abandoned the idea that all practitioners will use the same standards as the concept of interoperability is prevailing (through such instruments as the Z39.50 standard and of using such mechanisms as the Dublin Core Set of metadata to search for materials across different fields). But where do we start? And what are the issues and concerns that need to be considered in the adoption of certain standards? What are the questions that should principally be on the minds of newcomers, who are contemplating digitizing and networking a set of cultural resources for the first time? One approach to the question of "where to start?" is currently being adopted by NINCH. As many of you will know, NINCH is the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage, a diverse coalition of organizations launched in 1996 to both assure leadership from the cultural community in the evolution of the digital environment in general and to catalyze greater coordination and integration of digital cultural resources. Its members represent activity in the fields of the arts, the humanities and social sciences, through institutions that include museums, contemporary arts centers and organizations, universities, schools, archives and libraries. One of the clear needs we have recognized is not only for guidance in the methods used in digitizing and networking material but, more importantly, for guidance in determining the principles that should govern those methods. We have therefore engaged in an ambitious and overarching project that will seek to provide a "Guide to Good Practice in Networking Cultural Heritage" that will emphasize generalizable principle over detailed specification in the digital representation of cultural resources and in the management of its documentation. Our goal is to produce a standard language or "vocabulary" that can be used to read new iterations of specifications in any particular genre or field. We will not address the needs of specific institution-types but aim to produce a generalizable, universal document, into which specific concerns or the special needs of certain genres or object-types could be mapped. A NINCH Working Group (see below) will organize and direct the project. Representatives from different fields and different types of institutions will ensure a good coverage of the cultural community, with a group of additional advisors on hand. Our method for proceeding, once our goals are finally determined, will be to gather, review and evaluate all available documentation of current practice and experience and from them to elicit guiding principles that are informed by a range of pertinent issues. Our Guide would be designed as a primer on technical and information standards, metadata and best practices for a broad audience that would assume no prior knowledge. The primer would highlight the context and re-useability of material, intellectual property and longevity issues. It would also be addressed to funders, aiming to provide them with a set of key criteria for assessing the fundability of digital projects. KEY POINTS Salient points raised in the initial discussion of our working group included the following needs: to translate the growing number of technical and information standards into easily understood principles and guidelines for "best practice" and then to encourage their wide use by the community; to move beyond the "vigilante" stage of early developers of digital projects that are not translated or translatable for broader use (i.e. developing tools to enable regularization and consistency in methodology) and to especially allow for longevity or "time-proof" concerns; to address more holistically the standards and best practices cycle of digitization, discovery, use, re-use/re-purposing and preservation of material; (though each of these parts of the cycle need different work it is vital to be mindful of the needs of the whole cycle); to recognize and address early on the distinction between producing guidelines for capturing and representing knowledge in digital form on the one hand and in managing digital projects from start to finish on the other (the intellectual v. the managerial sides of the enterprise); and not to address specific institution-based audiences but to prepare guidance for a broad audience that would include libraries, archives, museums, individual scholars and others.   I would welcome feedback on our developing project and invite you to watch for reports on its development both through the NINCH public listserv and through our website.     WORKING GROUP Members of the working group currently include:   LEE ELLEN FRIEDLAND Senior Digital Conversion Specialist National Digital Library Program Library of Congress   DAVID GREEN Executive Director National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage   PETER HIRTLE Assistant Director Cornell Institute for Digital Collections   LORNA HUGHES Director Humanities Computing Group New York University   KATHY JONES-GARMIL Assistant Director Peabody Museum Harvard University Director Museum Digital Library Collection   MARK KORNBLUH Executive Director H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online   JOAN LIPPINCOTT Assistant Executive Director Coalition for Networked Information   MIKE NEUMAN, Director Research, Curriculum, & Development Group Academic & Information Technology Services Georgetown University   THORNTON STAPLES Chief Information Technology National Museum of American Art Director Digital Library Resources and Development University of Virginia Library   JENNIFER TRANT Executive Director Art Museum Image Consortium