>> Presenations NETWORKING CULTURAL HERITAGE: PROMISES & CHALLENGES Elements of a Cultural Action Agenda David Green Executive Director National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage December 1999   Introduction Beginnings Community Building Advocacy Practical Programs Conclusion   INTRODUCTION When Richard Feynman, the great American physicist visited Japan in 1985 to give a talk on “The Future of Computing,” he noted that “To come to Japan and talk about computers is like giving a sermon to Buddha.” I should add that, even though I am English, to come from the United States to Kyoto to talk about cultural heritage is also like giving a sermon to the Buddha. My only excuse I think is that while our topic today is very much about computing and about culture it’s also about people, about organizations, about politics and ways in which you get things done—and I may have something to contribute here. I understand that the focus of this conference is on how the City of Kyoto and others committed to this great city can better preserve, increase access and deepen understanding of your wonderfully rich cultural heritage, especially in the face of globalization. As will be pointed out many times in this conference, I’m sure, the Internet promises to make the local global and reverse the homogenizing effect of other media. But, as we all realize, there’s a complex array of strategies we must master to do this right. I understand your interest in looking at other models, other strategies of going about this task. And I am deeply honored by your invitation to talk about some U.S. developments, as represented in the organization I run. I have too little time to describe the American Scene as a whole but perhaps my presentation of the strategies developed by NINCH will help crystallize the key issues facing us all. I should like to start with a few principles. These, in fact, are principles we have developed for one of our projects: a Guide to Good Practice in creating and managing digital cultural heritage across all sectors and kinds of digital objects. In these Principles, we say that Good Practice should: OPTIMIZE THE INTEROPERABILITY OF MATERIALS ENABLE THEIR BROADEST USE ADDRESS THE NEED FOR THE PRESERVATION OF ORIGINAL MATERIALS INDICATE A STRATEGY FOR LIFE-CYCLE MANAGEMENT OF DIGITAL RESOURCES INVESTIGATE & DECLARE THEIR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY & RIGHTS RESTRICTIONS ARTICULATE THE INTENT & DECLARE THE METHODOLOGY of ANY PROJECT The purpose of NINCH is to build a framework within which different elements of the cultural community can collaborate to build a networked cultural heritage. This collaborative construction will happen not only under the auspices of NINCH but also outside NINCH in new partnerships encouraged or catalyzed by NINCH. This activity is taking place in the context of a country, the United States, that has no Ministry of Culture and no national cultural policy. Indeed it seems there is both an aversion and a distaste for developing a national cultural policy. Even existing agencies within the government such as the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities and even the Department of Education have been threatened with extinction in recent years. The United States is a very de-centered, federated, and distributed country, in which the relations between public and private, and among the central government, local governments, and commerce are constantly negotiated in almost every sphere. BEGINNINGS So how did NINCH come about in the U.S., and what is its role? In those early pre-Web 1990s, scholars, curators, librarians and information technologists had started discussions about how they could collaboratively and pro-actively participate in an electronic environment. NINCH was really galvanized into being by the Clinton Administration’s 1993 Agenda for Action, the “white paper” [final draft of a proposal] outlining the business, medical and scientific requirements for the construction of a “National Information Infrastructure” (the “Information Superhighway”). Although the Agenda for Action contained one official paper about the role of the humanities, many felt that in a context where there was no national policy and no Ministry of Culture to champion their cause, the cultural community was being sidelined. Three organizations took the lead in organizing a response: the American Council of Learned Societies, based in New York and representing scholars, the Coalition for Networked Information, based in Washington and serving librarians and information technologists, and the Getty Trust, that had early recognized the promises of the digital for art history , in Los Angeles. Thus, NINCH was established as the result of two twinned impulses, the professional and the political. The professional one was the desire for a proactive strategy for integrating and coordinating the use of computers in the arts and the humanities. Its political twin was the need to organize a strong response to the government’s challenge to articulate what the cultural sector needed out of the National Information Infrastructure as it was being conceived, deployed and guided by the Clinton Administration. These three organizations (ACLS, CNI & Getty) commissioned a brief survey of digital humanities projects, reviewed challenges ahead, published a report, “Humanities & Arts on the Information Superhighway, ”and challenged other national associations to join the movement. With my appointment as director in March 1996, NINCH was launched. We now have 70 members, ranging from the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, to the Society of American Archivists, the American Association of Museums, and an increasing number of research libraries, scholarly societies, humanities computing centers, museums and presses. NINCH was thus established as a beachhead, where the diverse and often fragmented cultural community could consider, in the light of the promises and threats of the Internet--this radical technology of connection and communication--what it wanted and how it should go about getting it. Our work plan has developed in a fairly consistent way along three principle strategies. They are: BUILDING COMMUNITY CREATING AN ADVOCACY PLAN DEVELOPING PRACTICAL PROGRAMS COMMUNITY BUILDING I decided our first charge would be to build, very self-consciously, a sense of identity, of community, common objectives, common needs, common ambition and common capabilities across this immense range of member organizations and institutions. The chief instrument here was information exchange and consisted of: an announcement listserv (ninch-announce) for information exchange – to help bring us all up to speed on issues and developments, new projects, new protocols; (this now reaches over 80,000 readers); a website (www.ninch.org) to map the community’s resources: acting as a general information resource for the whole community; speaking, writing and organizing conference sessions—about NINCH and its vision and about other digital projects; and surveying our members about their achievements and issues and what their priorities were for the digital future. In building our own identity we should also build bridges to other critically important communities. One of these is the community incorporating information science, computer science, and technology. Early on in NINCH’s history, we designed a broad initiative, Computer Science and the Humanities, with the National Academy of Science’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB). This was launched in 1997 with a roundtable discussion at the National Academy that included computer scientists, humanities practitioners, founders, and administrators all looking at the differences between these two worlds and how they could best be brought together to work on issues of mutual benefit. I’ll return to this, but you might note there is a very interesting report on the Roundtable from the American Council of Learned Societies After three and a half years, we’ve managed to create a space or framework that didn’t exist before in which the different sectors (the museums, 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." ADVOCACY They key to advocacy is vision. While building a sense of common enterprise through information exchange, we also needed to start the process of educating ourselves, policymakers, and the public about our vision of what networked cultural heritage would look like and about the critically important issues & challenges involved in achieving it. What is it? We envision a sophisticated, dynamically integrated, digital exploratorium; a virtual, distributed collection of cultural heritage will enable the reader/viewer/ listener to enjoy and work with digital objects of all kinds and in all media. It will be widely accessible, easily usable and deeply and usefully 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 will 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. This virtual place will be a new kind of place–at the same time it will be a library, a text-sound-and-moving-image archive, a museum, and an artist’s studio. The materials available will be incredibly. These range 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 will even be books. “Getting there” however, is, as we know, not a simple matter. It’s certainly not simply a matter of getting government money for “digitizing” great works or individual collections. Knowing exactly what it was that we wanted was something we also had to sort out. Before we could get to work on best practices, standards and interoperability, digital preservation, authentication, selection of material or funding, the issue that caught us by the throat was copyright in the digital age. Our members do many things with cultural property. They create it, own it, protect, preserve, describe, organize, present, publish, study and teach it. Many increasingly do many of these things. So, questions of ownership, guardianship, access, use, potential revenues and theft became hot buttons in the debate over the future of copyright online. (Here is a grand example of the broader application of “Interoperability” and of the importance of “getting along” online.) As the Federal Government prepared to update U.S. Copyright Law, an early version of the legislation strongly suggested that in the digital age the “fair use” defense would have to go. Fair Use is what enables scholars, teachers, critics and others in certain circumstances to re-use copyrighted material without seeking permission from copyright owners. A special Conference on Fair Use (CONFU) tried to establish specific restrictions on fair use to replace the ambiguous “four factors” used by judges in court cases to decide whether a use was fair or not . Battle lines between owners and users of copyright material were complicated by the fact that our coalition’s members all had multiple roles in the digital world. As CONFU heaved on it was apparent that few actually knew very much about copyright and less about fair use as it was, without even thinking about how things would be changed on the Internet. CONFU eventually collapsed with no consensus guidelines. NINCH joined others in organizing a series of Copyright Town Meetings across the country to educate our community about the basics of copyright, to hear their problems and to think about the future. Although we got involved in the copyright battles (that continue in ever more complicated ways) and although this caused many members to think more clearly about copyright, to see themselves as part of a broader picture and to develop their own policies and principles for managing intellectual property, as a coalition we drew back from taking legislative positions, redefining advocacy as education about issues, rather than urging a party line. Now under our advocacy banner we have three areas of work: Continuing Copyright Education and Development. Recognizing that copyright issues will get increasingly complex and will directly involve more of us (artists, curators, teachers, students, faculty, and the public), we are committing to continuing copyright education. This includes another set of eight Copyright Town Meetings across the country: educating what’s the law, how is it changing and how will it affect you; how is copyright not just about copying anymore, how is it not about just law anymore. Public Policy & Funding With some experience and understanding of our needs, now we can begin to influence public policy and funding of networking cultural heritage. We are gathering “Best Examples” and arguments about the value of this work and what we need to do it well so as to inform and educate policymakers, both inside and outside of government Mapping In order to achieve our earlier goal of representing the complex web of activity of our community, we plan to apply advanced web-based technology to seriously map our achievements in multi-dimensional forms. PRACTICAL PROGRAMS Lastly, we address our program development. After listening for three years to the issues and debates, we are developing a broad, balanced outlook on our way forward. And this includes thinking about the roles and contributions of the cultural community in partnerships with others. We are trying hard to work on projects that relate closely one to another and that also build on work done by others in the past. We are conscious of the importance of meeting urgent and well-defined needs of the present but we also must keep sight the necessary work of thinking about the future and preparing for a different generation of possibilities, a different generation of software and of very different digital environments. We shouldn’t build out based solely on what we grasp as our needs today. Briefly, our current programs include: 1. Database A working group of the 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 informational and policy-building resource for founders. We've designed a Dublin Core-based database structure; the National Endowment for the Humanities has delivered 110 records of its funded digital projects over the past three years; and Michigan and Rice Universities each have donated catalogers and library staff to get us to a working system. 2. A "Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation of Cultural Heritage and its Management." Taking advantage of the wide-ranging expertise in all types of cultural resources from all kinds of cultural institutions and of the urgent need for a guide to best practices in networking cultural heritage material across all object types (from manuscripts to movies) and institution types (from museums to universities), NINCH established a working group of eleven professionals to produce a Guide to Good Practice. The Working Group defined the parameters of the project and developed that set of basic guiding principles I opened with in my talk today, from which it derived criteria by which to judge current practice and projects. Fully funded by the Getty, we have selected a consultant team to survey the best of current practice and write the Guide that will be published both in print and as an ongoing website. 3. Computing & the Humanities: Building Blocks 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 is determining the longer-term needs of the cultural community, as we create a networked cultural heritage. 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? We recognize that early applications of computers and networking technology were driven by business and technical research and education needs. But 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. Convinced that there is much work to be done with computer scientists and information technologists, NINCH worked with the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies of Science to organize a Roundtable on Computer Science and the Humanities in 1997. This fueled great debate about difference and commonality between us and a determination to find ways of bridging the gaps to create the conditions for productive collaboration. 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 in the next century So what are we doing? We created a Steering Committee to work with the National Academy of Sciences and that has developed three current projects: BUILDING BLOCKS A CONFERENCE SERIES THE TWO RAVENS INSTITUTE Building Blocks Building Blocks is about the first steps: how we create a vocabulary to begin to talk together. We’ve decided to do this by organizing intensive meetings of some 140 scholars, teachers, curators and others, mostly drawn from the scholarly socieities organized into seven broad fields. The meetings will alternate field-based workshops with plenary sessions in order to define needs and share commonality and difference, patterns and definitions across the different fields. With over thirty workshops signed up, Building Blocks is co-designed with the scholarly societies in two parts. Part One will help the societies clarify and define some urgent issues and propose specific shorter-term projects that they can work on with computer scientists. Part Two will have as a goal the creation of a longer term "grand challenge" research agenda, defining the deeper, more challenging problems that humanists and scientists can work on together for their mutual benefit into the next decade. The Conference Series This highly focused investigation will be combined with the second project, a series of three annual conferences that would convene distinguished achievers in humanities computing with computer scientists, funders and policymakers. Best examples of recent work would be presented alongside many varied opportunities to extend the conversations of the 1997 Roundtable. The Two Ravens Institute The conference series will be complemented by the Two Ravens Institute, a place for symposia where distinguished thinkers and practioners would consider the impact of developments in computer science and of networked technology on the humanities as well as on society at large. Two Ravens should provide the ongoing structure for the continuation of the results of the other two components of this computing and humanities initiative. So this is the current range and ambition of ourdeveloping coalition, the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage. In brief, what may I, with presumption, offer from our experience as lessons for a new coalition grappling with the vast assortment of tasks related to networking cultural heritage, as you are embarked on in Kyoto? Discover what everyone is working with cultural heritage has done and is doing. Map the resources and current activity. Create a framework in which all sectors can work together and develop consensual best practice. Create new resources according to a set of best practices to make economic sense and to produce the richest materials that can be of greatest use to the greatest number of people and that can interoperate with other projects. Think seriously about the future, about the many potentials of the materials at hand, and work hard with computer scientists on problems that they find as compelling as you do. CONCLUSION Intellectual needs must shape technical solutions. 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.