>> Meetings MEMBERSHIP AND BOARD MEETING September 23, 1997 American Association of Museums Washington DC Summary Report Participants 1. Introduction Stan Katz, chairing the meeting, opened by declaring his sense that NINCH had made significant progress on many fronts since the last meeting. This broad community now had a voice and a space. Now that we were constituted we had a lot of hard work ahead of us--notably in the "intellectual property" arena. Paying tribute to Paul Peters, Stan recognized that Paul's loss was a significant loss to NINCH, but this meant the need for added impetus to move forward. David Green explained the organization of the agenda: his report would be broken down according to the three elements of the NINCH Start-Up Strategic Plan: Community Building; Communication & Education; and Advocacy. 2. Community Building. Director's Report David Green reported on membership. NINCH had 23 "basic" members. This number included a new member, the Association for Computers in the Humanities but also included the loss of two members due to aggregation (the Council on Library Resources and the Commission on Preservation and Access had become the Council on Library and Information Resources; and the Americans Council on the Arts and the National Assembly of Local Arts Agencies had joined to become Americans for the Arts). However, strictly speaking membership was much higher because the Association for Research Libraries (one of the 23 members) had developed a proposal whereby individual ARL libraries could elect to join NINCH directly to support ARL's financial commitment to NINCH. As a result 28 libraries had joined NINCH by September 23 (34 by December 10) giving a total membership of 51 in September. The Management Committee comprised five organizations, the Policy Council, 13 (two from the ARL libraries) and 33 organizations and institutions were General Members (26 of these, ARL libraries). See the complete list of NINCH members. The executive director expressed concern at retaining all the contemporary arts organizations as members (and in collecting dues from them). The highest priority for attracting new members should be with higher education groups. The Membership Committee, currently Duane Webster and Pat Williams, met after the meeting to consider outreach strategies to attract new members.   Roundtable Discussion on NINCH and Individual Members Open discussion on membership and ways to build the community proceeded as an open discussion. Kathleen McDonnell (Getty Information Institute) commended NINCH in its work to date, especially in the copyright-related information assembled on the website. She stressed the importance of working very closely in as integrated a way as possible with the Information Institute's own projects. The Institute was organized in a similar way to NINCH: with Advocacy & Education; Tools (Information Resources & Standards); and Demonstration Projects as the three components of their program. Getty was perhaps most interested in the advocacy element of NINCH's program, especially in pushing the legislative connection. NINCH had made a good start in its advocacy program but needed to keep up the momentum. Kathleen suggested we make the NINCH-members listserv more of an active list, that perhaps members themselves could moderate. Kathy Albrecht (Visual Resources Association) said that as a smaller organization VRA found NINCH giving it greater exposure to a larger picture. Joan Lippincott (CNI) hoped NINCH would continue to move deeper into issues and also clearly mark and celebrate the successes to date of networked cultural heritage: we needed examples of achievements that we could use in advocacy efforts. Chuck Henry (Rice University) endorsed NINCH's increased involvement in science and technology issues. He very much saw NINCH as a "big tent" drawing potential collaborators together. He also enthusiastically endorsed the "database" project that was encouraging humanities computing centers to work together more effectively. Pat Williams (American Association of Museums) saw NINCH providing expertise, and avenues to greater expertise on networking issues and emphasized the importance of CONFU and of G7 activities. Elaine Koss spoke of the value of NINCH in its own copyright education activities and especially with the ongoing Copyright Town Meetings. Duane Webster (Association of Research Libraries) saw NINCH adding a capability, further perspectives and an enlarged vision to ARL's work. He was particularly concerned to engage the higher education organizations. Sandria Freitag (American Historical Association) saw NINCH being able to do for learned societies what they can't do themselves in this arena and had the potential for helping them to figure out their futures. She saw potential work in: a) scholarly publishing (in crystallizing the issues); b) in thinking through how scholars can be involved at the beginning of the information-standards forming process; and c) provide a focus-point for discussions of the future of discipline-based societies. Kimber Craine (National Assembly of State Arts Agencies) saw copyright as the major issue that NINCH was helping his community with, but needed help in transferring the implications of current legislative developments to NASAA's constituencies. He was very interested in forming an arts-only group in determining the arts agenda within NINCH's umbrella. He volunteered to join a Website working group with Kelly White (Americans for the Arts). Marc Pachter felt the website should be developed to give pointers to other sites that had excellent resources on particular issues. Susan Fox felt that an equivalent to a "Policy Book" would be very useful in summarizing issues for advocacy purposes.   Cross-sector research projects: director's report David Green reported that the two parallel projects to connect humanists with computer scientists and public and private sectors advanced at different speeds. While the "Investing in Cultural Heritage" project, looking at economic/research partnerships between public and private sectors was slow in moving forward, the "Computing & the Humanities" project was moving rapidly with a very positive roundtable discussion that took place in March at the National Academy of Sciences, subsequently published as an ACLS "Occasional Paper," and the creation of a steering committee to guide this initiative forward.   International Links. NINCH had been invited to co-sponsor the Digital Resources in the Humanities conference in Glasgow in 1998 (an invitation that subsequently defaulted); had agreed to distribute "Discovering Online Resources in the Arts & Humanities," published by the Arts & Humanities Data Service, London; and was pursuing the organizing of an international distributed database of digital humanities projects, largely through the offices of campus-based humanities computing centers.   3. Communication and Education The director reported on the development of the NINCH-announce listserv (some 350 subscribers, augmented by its distribution by other lists), website and presentations made about NINCH or on networking issues (see Presentations).   4. Advocacy The director reported on the early results of the advocacy working group's survey of NINCH members, that was designed to help forge the basis of NINCH's advocacy activity. The survey (now available with final analysis of results) asked nine questions about NINCH's mission, members' understanding of advocacy, how members were currently advocating for various elements of networking cultural heritage, what kind of assistance they needed and how issues should be prioritized. The director was particularly interested in the response to the question of the kind of help members needed with their advocacy efforts, which he classified under: content, vehicle and strategy. Under content, four respondents said they needed assistance with intellectual property rights issues, and four that standards issues and the technical challenges of interoperability were the paramount subjects. Under "vehicle," four responses indicating the need for print guides to essential issues. Either "pithy descriptions of issues" "descriptions of best practices," "technical information sheets giving a description of a problem current work and outstanding issues," "practical tools for assessing issues" like worksheets or checklists. Lastly, under "strategy," were five comments about help needed with ways of thinking about or framing the issues: how to get people involved; how to frame and target programs to answer needs of policy makers; how to strategize about what and how to digitize. As publication had been mentioned a number of times, the director raised this as a question for the membership: should NINCH be thinking about print publication? Members answered resoundingly that this should be approached very cautiously. They advised the collaborative approach of publishing with members who already had established publishing ventures and to encourage others to publish, helping to publicize their work--especially through a resource website. Pat Williams announced the collaborative AAM/Getty/Pew publication project that was commencing: a primer on the creation, ownership, use, and legal issues of intellectual property for museums:"Museums and Intellectual Property: A Primer for the Field.   Report on Copyright advocacy activity The director reported on NINCH's work in educating members about digital copyright issues. This in sum has comprised: updating on legislative issues via the listserv and writing many educative articles on the issues the formation of a comprehensive "Copyright & Fair Use Education" web page, through the agency of a NINCH Fair Use Working Group reporting on the CONFU process, for example "CONFU Continues? Is it Time to Re-Group?" in the June 1997 ARL Newsletter; a participant in the National Humanities Alliance's "Committee on Intellectual Property," that created the "NHA Principles" for managing intellectual property--given a home on the NINCH webpage; a close observer of the development of museum licensing collectives preparation of a "NINCH Copyright Summit" that was subsequently held in November 1997.   Summary of Action Items Recommended:   Education: show examples of success (Joan Lippincott) develop an interactive listserv for discussion among members (Kathleen McDonnell) work to enable the community to be more proactive in standards formation (Sandy Freitag) Publications: work collaboratively (John D'Arms) create a publications sub-committee website: create "bookmarks" (or guides, or links) for issues (Marc Pachter) create a Policy Book on Fair Use and other issues (Susan Fox; Pat Williams)