>> Presenations Digital Resources for the Humanities 1996, Oxford Networked Cultural Resources--International Perspectives: NINCH Introduction Definition and History Vision & Mission Membership The Future Conclusion Introduction I'm happy to be here to talk about the United States' brand new National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH)--especially in the context of this range of related national initiatives, programs, services and networks. It's good to be following Lyn Elliot Sherwood's presentation on the Canadian Heritage Information Network, concluding as it does with the call for cross-sectoral communication, as communications itself will be central to NINCH's action plan and indeed is an essential ingredient to the very constitution of the organization. From the start I think we can say that NINCH's remit is startlingly much broader and less specific than Britain's Arts & Humanities Data Service or the Canadian Heritage Information Service (it doesn't have a single master, it doesn't have a single mandate, it doesn't have a stunning budget). Primarily an educational and catalyzing instrument for digitizing and networking cultural resources in the U.S., NINCH will face its task and constituencies in a way that, I submit, will be necessarily somewhat different: in terms of approach, authority, resources and funding and perhaps in overall ambition. NINCH should not be bureaucratic, it should definitely keep the spirit of the whole enterprise of the arts and humanities and not get bogged down by the technocratic. As colleague Charles Henry has said of a related project "we should never lose sight of the spirit of exuberance and the transcendent quality of the humanities and arts." One other preliminary point I want to emphasize is that, despite the enormous amount of digitizing activity happening in the museums, the universities, the schools, libraries and by artists and arts institutions in the U.S., there is no single place, event or organization where you can currently get a good look at what is going on in the way you can, say, at the British Academy. Funding agencies such as the NEH, the NEA and the Mellon Foundation will give you glimpses; the conferences of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Coalition for Networked Information, the College Art Association, the American Association of Museums or the American Library Association will give you other quite different cross sections but there is no single space for an overall view. (Some scholars may work closely with libraries, but most do not.) It is such a space that it is NINCH's ambition to create and fill.   Definition and History So what is NINCH? It is a nonprofit membership coalition of arts & humanities organizations (representing everything from archaeologists to videographers) established by a core of three curiously related organizations: the American Council of Learned Societies, the Coalition for Networked Information and the Getty Art History Information Program. NINCH was established as the result of two twinned impulses: one, the very proactive, strategic desire to organize an integrated approach to the use of computers and electronic information in the arts and the humanities (that goes back quite a few years) and the other more political thrust, the awareness of the need to organize a strong broad sectoral response to the federal government's challenge to articulate what this sector needed from the National Information Infrastructure, as it was being conceived, deployed and guided by the Clinton Administration. All three organizations had been involved in the first of these thrusts for a while. ACLS, based in New York, is the most established of the three, founded in 1919 and now servicing 58 national scholarly organizations. Although its logo is a ring of books, under the presidency of Stan Katz it has been a leader in looking at the implications of the newer communications and information media for many years. (ACLS thus represents a "cultural heritage" component of NINCH) Getty AHIP, one of the many arms of the Getty Trust based in Santa Monica, CA, has been producing some of the most universally useful research and documentation tools in art history for scholars worldwide. For the last few years, especially under the energetic leadership of Eleanor Fink, it has been particularly dedicated not only to digitizing, networking and integrating those tools but also, often through forging extensive collaborations with other organizations, working to establish common standards in the conceptualization, description, cataloging and digitizing of cultural information. This has resulted in work beyond the strict confines of art history--and AHIP will soon be changing its name--to the Getty Information Institute. Kathleen McDonnell, manager of AHIP's Network Initiatives, together with Joseph Busch and Jennifer Trant are here at the conference. (So Getty AHIP supplies both the work with cultural heritage but also with the underpinnings of digital networking). The Coalition for Networked Information--last of these three NINCH sponsors--the invention of its director Paul Evan Peters and others, was established in 1990 as a result of the wide-spreading need to focus on the implications of digital networking technologies in the research and learning communities--and also to work on the now-important task of integrating projects and approaches so that some coherence might emerge. Not at all limited to the arts and humanities, CNI was formed as a catalytic body to help realize the potential of computer networks to advance scholarship and enrich intellectual productivity across a wide field and was itself the child of three university based information technology and library organizations: ARL, CAUSE and Educom (these last with an especial IT focus). With 200 members in its taskforce, CNI's biannual meetings are critically important for discovering the latest projects in electronic networking in this community. In many ways NINCH is CNI's "cultural" project and it supplies the expertise and context for the "networked" component of NINCH. These three organizations first worked together in putting together a 1992 invitational conference at the University of California, Irvine: "Technology, Scholarship & the Humanities." The following year, 1993, was the first year of the new Clinton Administration. And this is where the second impulse comes into play: the urgent need to organize a broad sectoral response by the cultural community to the challenge of the Administration's "Action Agenda" in its orchestrating what it was calling the National Information Infrastructure. As you may know, the government's approach to the development of "the information superhighway," is of leveraging commercial construction. All expectations for major investment of thought, skill and funding in high-powered computing in the educational sector, as represented by the National Research and Education Network (NREN) have been rather overshadowed and upstaged by the noise of the combat conducted by the telecommunications giants over the parceling out of lucrative electronic real estate by the recent Telecommunications Act. There's no doubt that the NII is being directed out of the Dept. of Commerce, with an occasional nod to the use of such an infrastructure by the educational and cultural enterprise. The strategy employed by this group is one to be expected in a nation organized as the United States is. With no Ministry of Culture overseeing an existing program of an analog inventory of cultural heritage, with the Endowments reeling from massive hemorrhaging and deep strikes to their self-confidence (currently Bills calling for their abolition are before Congress), and with Education as one of the weaker government departments--working in an area where the private sector is particularly strong, the mode of action in these federated United States is likely to be, even more strongly than elsewhere, one of dynamic independent projects comparatively loosely linked and needing some coordination and integration but no centralized direction from a single HQ. So the first order of business was to organize a meeting of 25 leading cultural organizations to review the broad situation of the arts, the humanities and information technology. The priorities emerging from the meeting were: to survey the field; to draw up a list of the challenges ahead (technical, social, cultural; and to articulate a vision of how the arts & culture fit in with (and could transform) the NII and of what was needed from government. Two working groups were commissioned: one to survey the field; the other to define the challenges to be met for this enterprise to move forward. The resulting report, "Humanities and the Arts on the Information Highways," was presented to a cultural assembly in July 1994, in Washington, together with a proposal for creating an organization to effect the report's recommendations. Throughout 1995, the three originating organizations put together a broad coalition with a membership structure and an executive director was appointed this March. So you see that NINCH is by no means a government program or agency; it is a broad nonprofit membership coalition of arts & humanities organizations engaged in what some might call a high-wire act of conjuring and orchestrating this array of activities in the absence of a governmental directive.   Vision & Mission NINCH's overall vision is one surely shared by us all and it may be redundant to even articulate it. But let me try and you can tell me what you think is missing. It is to do what we can to ensure that what we can broadly call our cultural heritage--those creations of the human imagination that reflect and creatively, critically re-engage us with our humanity, both from the past and the active present--is placed on the evolving global information infrastructure in such a way that it be of the highest possible quality and fidelity, that it be widely accessible, easily searchable and usable --to the general public as well as to scholars and the school-age population that it be fully relational and functional in a variety of media (that is that users can move from a given text to any other text, image, sound or multimedia file and back again in an integrated way) using "natural" or "native language" search mechanisms/agents) that it be imaginatively and creatively interfaced, that it be accompanied by rich documentation, description and commentary and include all variants. NINCH's mission is to communicate digital networking developments, consequent issues and a broad working agenda across the spectrum of organizations we represent to catalyze further developments in the field especially across sectors (museums & libraries for instance) and developing with funders some major, 'industrial strength' digitizing projects; to coordinate developments as far as it can; and to advocate nationally and internationally, with government and funders the importance of doing this. I should stress that, though this is a U.S. based initiative, it is not about defining US culture. The international stage is already, and will continue to be, a very important one for us.   Membership NINCH's membership is evolving. With 23 pledged organizations ranging from the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian to the Association of Art Museum Directors, we are now entering our second stage of attracting members at various levels of participation, including international members. The Initiative was formed to cut across an enormous spectrum of cultural organizations--from local, regional and national museums to public and research libraries, to discipline-based learned and professional associations, to institutions of higher learning to organizations representing living artists and the thriving artistic and cultural life of the moment. So its mode will be a relational one: connecting, interpreting. Somewhat arbitrarily perhaps I divide our membership into four groups: the contemporary arts; the humanities; museums; and libraries. I'd like to give you a sense of who they are and what some of their specific issues are: I The Arts include contemporary arts organizations, artists groups and arts agencies. Current members include the National Assemblies of State Arts Agencies and Local Arts Agencies; the National Association of Artists Organizations, Arts Wire and Arts Edge (two major online networks in the arts and arts-in-education, respectively). Their concerns and issues are clearly those of copyright protection but also of the innovative uses of the medium, of access to tools and equipment, of innovative ways to disseminate work electronically, of ways of describing and documenting work (creating and, we hope, interconnecting digitized slide libraries). NALAA and NASAA have enviable infrastructures on the ground and now need to find ways of mobilizing them to release materials and local expertise to create an effective cultural communications and information infrastructure. Such an infrastructure, matching and interconnecting those built by museums, universities and libraries is essential to the work of this Initiative. II The Humanities include professional societies and associations, university research and teaching, and teaching in schools. The research issues here are ones you are all very familiar with. They probably begin with concerns over the critical mass of material available ("will what I want to find be there?"), its quality and authenticity, and continue with concerns about the cross-referentiality of methods of knowledge representation and of interoperability of searching mechanisms (in other words "Standards"). They cover not only the needs for search tools to enable the researcher to go to exactly what she knows she wants but also "discovery" tools to enable exploration, serendipity and other less clear-cut heuristic events. They clearly cover the continuation of "fair use," and for the time being at least (while html is still so popular) guidance to model Web sites--such as that being prepared by the American Arts & Letters Network (see www.aaln.org). Within teaching, concerns include access to equipment and expertise and to creative teaching tools and concepts that will enable teachers to use material imaginately, once it has been found; distance learning; and the fair use of copyrighted material. Academic publishers have clear concerns over intellectual property and of new forms of distribution and use of that property. III: Libraries and other Information/Knowledge institutions: this covers public, university and research libraries, archives, preservation and conservation organizations. Libraries are clearly concerned about changes to copyright law, especially to the understanding and implementation of fair use and first sale principles and concomitant fears of a future made up of licensing and the distopian panoptican specter of "pay-per-page" culture where every bit and byte is locked down and the concept of browsing is lost. Beyond this, funding and provision of access sites is also a clear concern. For Archives and groups working on the preservation and conservation of materials, (whether they be brittle books or crumbling videotapes issues include digitizing for preservation *or* access; the "migration"of material from one medium to another and the preservation of digital records. IV: Museums include the range of museums and current members include the Smithsonian, American Assoc. of Museums, Assoc ArtMD, Museum Computer Network. The issues in this community include those of disseminating the concept and implementation of widely shared standards in describing, cataloging, indexing, digitizing collections; of the economics of this enterprise and of relations with commercial digitizers; licensing the use of digitized collections; innovative ways of distributing and sharing material, and working with other institutions and sectors. Future Action A sketch of NINCH's evolving plan would be divided into three parts: communication and education; project facilitation; and advocacy. I EDUCATION First, NINCH's communications functions include both the creation of: a) a "clearinghouse," an information and news source; and b) the provision of a neutral Common Ground space for people to meet face-to-face. Thus NINCH will be both a Hub and a Convenor. As the very first steps in building the "clearinghouse," we currently have one listserv for members, (for the really hot news) and one general NINCH-Announce listserv for anyone who's interested--mostly in newsletter format. These will be supplemented this summer by a web site, ;linking, orgnaizing and integrating information. AALN is an important co-venture here in putting down a trustworthy guide to useful sources on the WWW. Other electronic suggestions include: ¥ NINCH's licensing an electronic agent to scour the networks for detailed information on who's doing what. (This suggestion from John Unsworth at IATH at UVa--one project of theirs is compiling an SGML DTD for archeological and architectural projects, specifically to be used with work reconstructing Pompeii (that would be used with VRML to build spatial representations of different theories of how Pompeii would have looked). But to the question, 'who else might be building an architectural SGML DTD?" no-one had an answer. A scouring agent might be one answer here. ¥The NEH has suggested that the growing number of University-based Centers for Computing in the Humanities (like IATH at UVA, FLAME at Michigan, ATHENA, CHANT at Maryland) needed some way of beginning to regularly communicate their research and work: NINCH could help provide such a space.] The second part of this communications plan would be to act as a convenor. As part of the interim conclusions of a very useful report on its "Research Agenda for Networked Cultural Heritage," published recently by Getty AHIP, editor David Bearman identified one of the four major infrastructure needs for this field as that of a single venue, such as an "Annual Review of Arts & Humanities Computing," a conference or an electronic list or site through which progress on developing a "research agenda" can be reported and assessed. NINCH needs to create such a space. This could comprise: sponsoring panels or sessions at other groups' conferences (bringing in other points of views, or more comprehensive overviews as ACLS did at its last meeting); creating "Summit" Meetings within a sector or across sectors. This should comprise at one end of the spectrum very open-ended symposia on larger issues, along the lines suggested by the "Two Ravens" Institute, proposed by Charles Henry, and at the other, working sessions to hammer out practical agreements, such as AHA's suggestion that NINCH convene a meeting between professional societies and commercial digitizing firms to discuss pricing structures; working with the National Humanities Center, etc; hosting our own conferences.   II FACILITATING PROJECTS Resting on this first stage and the lessons learned from it, NINCH will generate a range of more pro-active initiatives on specific issues. I've mentionedsome of these issues in discussing members' concerns. There are very many and we still need to prioritize and develop cross-sectoral strategies, but they will include: intellectual property--both national and international--in the new environment, especially concerning those principles of fair use, first sale and limited shareability, and especially vis-à-vis the new intellectual property management software that is now coming onto the market. This is an important international agenda item. Part of it is communication--making sure people understand the principles and the law, part of it is advocacy; access-- public access projects (getting funding directed to getting key public, education, museums and libraries wired and to enable the facilitation of the basic training of users of the hardware) advocating for tools that will make access to cultural heritage material easy for everyone despite their context and "language set" information standards--something I guess we are all intimately involved in the economics of this enterprise, both the cost factors involved and developing relations with commercial service providers (digitizers, image banks, software manufacturers, etc.). Licensing is becoming an increasingly popular concept, but one that cuts both ways. Demonstration projects (specific developmental projects relating two sectors needs and interests to show what can be done)--along the lines of MESL and LA Concept Developing players to work together on some main stream major digitizing projects.   ADVOCACY The third level on which NINCH will operate is that of advocating on a national and international level the importance of this enterprise, of doing it well and in an internationally coordinated way; helping create an environment, in which the funding and participation in networked cultural resources is encouraged and made as easy as possible. We are already working closely with the advisory President's Committee on the Arts & Humanities in putting together recommendations on how the government may help (chiefly using the leverage principle).   In all of these areas, international activity will be essential: learning about projects and developments in other countries and being a vehicle for reciprocal information; stimulating international demonstration projects; and joining forces with parallel organizations abroad for advocating for further funding and greater attention to this enterprise globally. Conclusion So I think you can see that NINCH's job and constituency is broad. As we conceive of it currently, it will be primarily an educational and catalyzing instrument for digitizing and networking cultural resources. The idea is that it should teach, lead and facilitate: showing what is possible, what is now available, what projects are under way; play middleman and facilitator in stimulating more sophisticated projects, especially across the sectors of the coalition. The project will involve developing a range of stances, or relationships, towards others: to technical development projects (CIMI'S CHIO; ACCORD); intellectual research (Getty AHIP's "Research Agenda;" Knowledge Representation issues); practical "real-life" projects (MESL; LA Concept); international collaborative projects and other nations' approaches and systems. Beyond our member organizations, we have to establish relationships with foundations and other funders, with the corporate and commercial world, with the "General Public" and with the media. I think the direction that we go as we develop our own plan for action will be somewhat new and will depend upon our being somewhat light on our feet. Keeping the spirit of the arts and humanities alive in this endeavor is central, at the same time that we understand the need for on-the-ground hard work at hammering out technical details and cooperative agreements. Whether we can do this in dealing with enormous member organizations--with the AAM and the ALA--is one of our challenges. But, above all, it is essential that we keep an ongoing triangulation of the needs and concerns of our members with technological progress and intellectual research.