>> Meetings

HEADLINE:Executive Committee Meeting, Summary Report

Monday October 26, 1998

10:00 am - 4:30 pm

Conference Room
Association of Research Libraries
21 Dupont Circle, NW
Washington DC

R E P O R T

SUMMARY

MEMBERSHIP MEETING

BOARD MEETING

 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The overall goal of the NINCH Membership and Board Meetings was to outline the steps to be taken in designing a new Strategic Plan that would guide NINCH's next phase of development. Such a plan would incorporate members own sense of the coalition's achievements to date and their expectations for the future.

The first part of the meeting comprised a review of NINCH's achievements over the last year, a brief review of the results of the member survey and an overview of goals for the coming year.

NINCH membership increased by 40% to 68 organizations and institutions (with the addition of 19 members). It was advised that recruitment of new member organizations from new sectors (K-12 or higher education, for example) should await the new Strategic Plan (we should "build numbers around strategies" rather than the reverse).

An early summary analysis of the Member Survey indicated broad and general approval of NINCH's performance to date. Information needs were being met, although the director was encouraged to re-instate the NINCH Newsletter. Respondents encouraged more active involvement by--and connection between--members through stimulating discussion and engaging members on specific projects. It was suggested that NINCH extend its copyright work to gather evidence from the community on the impact of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on the fair use of copyrighted digital material. The Advocacy Working Group would consider this under its remit.

Two new working groups were being formed. One would prepare a program to respond to the community's need for "Guides to Best Practice." Another, a visual arts group, would discuss best practices and technical and information standards to create more interoperable digital image libraries of works by contemporary artists.

Various NINCH representatives briefly reported on aspects of our broad bridge-building initiative with the computer science community, notably the international distributed database of humanities projects, a series of projected conferences, and a humanities informatics project conducted with ACLS member societies. Others reported on "close partner" projects, with which NINCH was related, including Two Ravens, American Strategy and a "Partners in Tourism Gateway for Cultural Heritage and the Arts."

Susan Fox reported on the progress of the Advocacy Working Group. This committee had clarified NINCH's definition of advocacy and had drawn up several key policy statements. Rather than focusing on an external advocacy campaign, the group decided first to strengthen the internal advocacy framework of the coalition. This Working Group volunteered to create the advocacy component of the next NINCH Strategic Plan.

Part of NINCH's advocacy role is to make the case for greater funding of humanities digital networking. To assist the NSF's Michael Lesk argue for greater support of this work, both at NSF and further afield, NINCH assembled a collection of "Best Examples" of Cultural Networking . At the meeting, Mr. Lesk spoke about the specifics of current support, such as DLI-2, in which the humanities ranked with medical informatics in volume of applications.

The Board Meeting elected Marc Pachter, representing the Smithsonian Institution, onto the Executive Committee, and the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies onto the Board. It unanimously approved the Advocacy and Copyright Policy Statements. A Strategic Plan Working Group was constituted from Board members. It will be chaired by Pat Williams and will focus on three areas: Advocacy; Governance, Membership & Finance; and Program.

A. GENERAL MEMBERSHIP MEETING

Present: Pat Williams, Barry Szczesny (American Association of Museums); John D'Arms (ACLS); Sandria Freitag (American Historical Association); Kelley White (Americans for the Arts); Roger Lawson (Art Libraries Society of North America); Duane Webster (Association of Research Libraries); Joan Lippincott (Coalition for Networked Information); Deanna Marcum (Council on Library and Information Resources); Melissa Smith Levine (Library of Congress); Kimber Craine (National Assembly of State Arts Agencies); Lorna Hughes (New York University, Humanities Computing Group); Susan Fox (Society of American Archivists); Claire Muldoon (Smithsonian Institution); Kent Richards (Society of Biblical Literature; Scholarly Press); Chuck Henry (Rice University); Kathe Albrecht (Visual Resources Association).

Apologies: Lynne Boone Clement (Kennedy Center); Mike Neuman (Association for Computers and the Humanities); Susan Ball (College Art Association); Kathleen McDonnell (Getty Information Institute); Phyllis Franklin (Modern Language Association); Fred Heath (Texas A&M University Library).

 

1. Introduction and Goals of the Meeting

John D'Arms, chairing the meeting, welcomed member representatives and called for brief introductions. Executive Director, David Green, explained the goals of the meeting, which were to outline steps and key components for the design of the next Strategic Plan, based on the existing Start-Up Plan, a review of achievements to date and the results of the recent Member Survey.

In sum, he said NINCH's four core achievements in 1997-98 were:

Looking ahead the executive director's four summary goals, beyond continuing the work on current projects, were:

  • working with the Board and a Working Group to create a new Strategic Plan (incorporating a new membership and financial support structure for NINCH);
  • connecting more members through a larger but limited number of working groups, charged with specific and well-articulated goals;
  • producing a series of "Guides to Best Practices" in networking cultural resources for the community; and
  • continuing to be an information hub, enabling members to be well positioned to take advantage of new technological, financial, and organization opportunities in the digital environment.

The meeting was organized under the rubrics of the three elements of the NINCH Start-Up Strategic Plan, combining a review of achievements past with plans for the way forward in each of these areas.

 

2. COMMUNITY-BUILDING

a). Membership

David Green reported on a 40% increase in membership to 68 organizations and institutions by the addition of 19 members.

Discussion focused on the kind of strategy that the Membership Working Group should adopt in attracting new members. Do we need to define our program more clearly so that we can identify specific targets more directly? Melissa Levine spoke to her experience of how NINCH had successfully built a sense of common interests among participating members: rather than target new constituencies (e.g. K-12 or higher education) we should focus on those with clearly analogous concerns. Joan Lippincott felt that during this year of building the new Strategic Plan we should not bring in new groups that would alter the strategy. Pat Williams agreed that we should build numbers around strategies but also thought we should keep an outside pool of clearly related organizations that could be pulled in for specific projects or expertise. Kent Richards agreed that we needed to identify more clearly the set of needs we wanted to meet.

Thus it was agreed that any thinking and work conducted by the Membership Working Group would be coordinated with the work of the Strategic Planning Group (to date the two members of the membership group are also part of the Strategic Planning Group).

The chief conclusion of this discussion was that the new Strategic Plan should address which target groups would enrich and deepen the coalition and help it achieve its goals.

b. Bridge-building

Computer Science & Humanities

After considering our immediate community, membership heard reports on our bridge-building activity with the computer science community.

This initiative had developed out of the 1997 Roundtable on Computing and the Humanities at the National Academy of Sciences. Digital technologies have the potential for changing the ways that both scientists and humanists operate and this initiative is one form for capturing those possibilities. Chuck Henry reported on the Steering Committee on Computer Science and the Humanities, formed to move the agenda of the successful Roundtable forward by exploring a range of collaborative possibilities between the two communities. Beyond the specific activities within this initiative to be reported on by others, Chuck mentioned a series of conferences on the issue of archiving digital material that was being organized by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. This would seek to engage computer scientists in archiving issues and incorporate examples of humanities material.

Lorna Hughes reported on the International Distributed Database for Digital Humanities Projects run by a consortium of directors of humanities computing centers in the US, Canada and the U.K. With a data structure now in place, initial loading of data from the NEH, Mellon and some UK sources would begin this fall. The NEH was in particular delighted with this project as it coincided with its review of the digital projects it had funded. Deanna Marcum commented that the Digital Library Federation had concluded that successful digital projects would need to be cataloged and entered into bibliographies alongside traditional resources. She encouraged the leaders of this project to consider developing a link from successful projects to traditional bibliographies and catalogs.

Joan Lippincott reported on a series of proposed "best practices" conferences designed under the umbrella of the Steering Committee on Computer Science & the Humanities. These would exhibit and initiate conversations between the creators of particularly exemplary digital projects conducted by humanists and computer scientists. The subjects for discussion are planned to be as much about the methodological approaches, infrastructure and implementation of projects as about purely technical issues. Funders would be encouraged to look closely at these sessions and think about the implications for higher education and for future funding of digital projects. Joan also pointed out that graduate students and those new to the field would be especially encouraged to participate in these conferences and that a scholarship fund would be developed to help facilitate this.

Sandy Freitag reported on the ACLS/NINCH "Building Blocks" project to develop a set of core principles on the way that different fields within the humanities worked with their resource materials and created and represented new knowledge. This approach to develop a "humanities informatics" would both help individual fields to develop consensus about how to mount material in the digital environment and create a platform and vocabulary with which to discuss collaboration with computer scientists in designing new software, tools and environments for humanists to work more successfully in the digital arena.

After hearing these brief reports of the various components of the larger initiative with the National Academy of Sciences, John D'Arms felt that this was a "signal set of directions" for NINCH that should clearly be considered by the Strategic Plan Working Group.

 

c. Close Partners

There then followed a series of extremely brief reports from projects with which NINCH is allied. Chuck Henry reported on the Two Ravens Institute, hosted by Rice University Libraries and The Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley, in association with NINCH, The Center for Arts and Cultural Policy, The Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University and the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute, University of Glasgow. Two Ravens was designed to deepen discussion around the relationship between technology and the humanities through a series of fora for humanists and technologists.

Claire Muldoon reported on American Strategy, a national initiative through which federal agencies are cooperating to share their digitized collections of cultural heritage material. Pat Williams reported on the development of the "Partners in Tourism Gateway for Cultural Heritage and the Arts," a website that will provide entry to over 2,000 heritage organizations around the country as part of an initiative bringing cultural nonprofits together with the commercial tourism industry and local tourist agencies. For more on the Partners in Tourism initiative, see <http://www.aam-us.org/cultural.htm>.

 

d. What We Want

i) Report

David Green made an initial report on the results of the members survey distributed by email and available on the NINCH website. Seventeen of our 68 members responded by the date of the board meeting. The results and analysis are available on the members webpages.

The questions asked were about original expectations of NINCH and how they had been met; whether members felt NINCH's scope of operation was specific and adventurous enough; how NINCH had performed in providing certain kinds of information, in connecting members and in catalyzing new activity; what members' expectations were of NINCH's future activity; and, finally, which members' projects had been informed or augmented by association with NINCH.

Principal expectations included the provision of information and the creation of a forum for discussion; establishing or improving relationships between member organizations; actively working together in a group; fostering collaborations; and representing our concerns to federal government, national committees and the wider world.

Generally, expectations had been and were continuing to be met. Some saw that more active connection and collaboration were beginning to happen after the necessary work of determining NINCH's advocacy stance. Some were especially pleased by the way that involvement with NINCH and exposure to the issues NINCH had raised was "helping us understand our own issues, others' issues and the wider context in which we operate," as one organization put it. Others wanted more opportunities to talk; still others wanted to move more quickly beyond talk into active collaboration. The only pointed criticism in this section was that NINCH "does not take much advantage of the full range of its members."

Most members thought that NINCH was both specific, practical and exploratory enough. The Visual Resources Association, understanding that for the first few years NINCH needed to build and assess itself as a broad coalition, could see that it was now positioned to indeed become both more boldly specific and more adventurous.

Under "Performance," there were several inconclusive replies but 13 of the 17 respondents replied that NINCH had "done well" in providing Legislative/Advocacy Information; Issues Education and Conference and Event Information. When it came to Practical/Best Practices Information, 8 said we'd "done well," 3 said we'd done "not well" and six couldn't say. For connecting between members and their projects 7 said we'd "done well," 2 "not well" and eight couldn't say. And finally in conceptualizing and catalyzing new activity six said we'd "done well," four, "not well" and seven couldn't say. Three respondents emphasized the need for more concerted work on best practices and two commented specifically on the future need to "initiate and shepherd projects among its members."

Future expectations included:

  • the continuation of our communications and education program: "to continue to help organizations develop consensus understandings of the issues;"
  • linking together members and projects more forcefully ("working as a catalyst to facilitate networking among ourselves (as NINCH members) to learn more about one another's projects and practices; perhaps aiding coalitions of members find technology partners from industry; representation of cultural community needs/issues at industry conferences;"
  • acting as a catalyst for programs and initiatives ("a plausible but very difficult role");
  • giving guidance and leadership (especially in "helping to find what is common to all and to share it among its members");
  • sponsoring workshops and initiating projects that are "general enough to be applicable to several communities, but specific enough to be practical to all";
  • on the advocacy agenda: "aggressive lobbying for representation and funding and better representation on federal committees;" and "continuing endeavors to gain recognition for the importance of funding humanities computing initiatives."

 

Overall, the conclusions drawn by the executive director are:

  • NINCH has generally done very well in providing the information and context members need;
  • NINCH has done fairly well in stimulating discussions, and members would like to see more of this;
  • NINCH has much more to do in actively convening members around specific issues to catalyze collaborative initiatives (that don't necessarily imply NINCH administrative involvement);
  • NINCH needs to find ways of connecting and involving members (balancing listening with leading); focusing on "best examples" and "best practices" may be one route for doing this.
ii) Discussion

Duane Webster suggested that one very real need that NINCH could help answer was in gathering community evidence about the problems encountered in the fair use of copyrighted digital material under the provisions of the new Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This makes de-encryption devices illegal, but allows libraries and others to use such devices as long as that use is "fair use."

NINCH had, he said, been very successful in this area and, through its widespread coalition, was well placed to collect such information from the broad cultural community. The humanities community would normally be slow to report such problems and it was thought that this would be an excellent NINCH opportunity.

Joan Lippincott thought this an ideal project for bringing in a legal consultant who could help design an instrument that could gather evidence about whether projects are being slowed down by the requirements of the new act.

Duane Webster promised ARL staff assistance and the possibility of assistance from the "Shared Legal Capability" of five library organizations. It was recommended that NINCH coordinate with the National Humanities Alliance. This was considered to be a key agenda item for the coming year and would require either a new Working Group or a task force of the Advocacy Working Group.

3. Communications & Education

Under pressure of time, the executive director gave an abbreviated report on NINCH's communications and education achievements, referring members to his printed report. The listserv had wide distribution and had elicited much praise. The website similarly was well used and was broadly praised, particularly for its copyright pages. A website Working Group had met and made specific recommendations for its improvement, but these have not yet been implemented.

Duane Webster advised pushing to ensure that regular digested reports (both of NINCH activity and of issues in the field) were made available for membership beyond the simpler announcements.

Sandy Freitag asked for links to the summaries of conferences that were advertised on the NINCH conference calendar, so that NINCH members could benefit from the information although they might not have been able to attend.

4. Advocacy

a. Best Examples

Under the discussion of the "Best Examples" webpage (a collation of the community's own sense of what the best examples of our practice has been to date), David Green was pleased to introduce Michael Lesk, Division Director of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. It was Michael's challenge that had caused us to organize this project to help make the case for significantly greater federal funding for humanities digital projects.

Michael Lesk is the division director chiefly responsible for the Digital Library Initiative. He opened by describing the response to the second round of this initiative that encouraged application from the cultural community. DLI-2 had received 220 submissions for a total request of $400 million. The heaviest application areas were the humanities and medical informatics. The weakest areas were in non-traditional data (sound, moving images, etc.), organizational issues, sustainability questions and legal copyright issues. The deadline for the second round of DLI-2 is May 17.

Michael also pointed out the new grant program, International Digital Libraries Collaborative Research (see the October 8 NINCH Announcement on this topic) that welcomed any humanities input (deadline January 15).

Michael moved on to discuss NSF's attention to humanities computing. It still wasn't clear to him whether there was a need for a specific humanities computing program at NSF or whether there simply needs to be more digital library funding opportunities to which humanities were encouraged to apply. He still needed to understand the unique needs of those working in computing in the arts and humanities. From the computer scientist's perspective he could see an interest in working with humanities material: it is different; people are likely to actually use it; the likelihood of international collaboration on working with unique humanities materials is high; and it has strong educational value.

It was clear to him that humanists needed "content infrastructure"--a corpus of US material with which they could work. He had been pushing for NSF support for major and comprehensive digitization support, but, although there is a clear interest in diversifying the kinds of material that are available on the networks, there is a strong imperative to include the means to measure the economic effectiveness of this activity. Ideal projects would work with intellectually exciting material and include the means to measure their economic effectiveness.

Other NSF areas of interest included ethical and legal implications of using digital resources and how disabled people use computers.

Michael was interested in proposing a "National Cultural Foundation" that could fund humanities digital projects.

b) Advocacy Report

Susan Fox summarized the history of the year's progress by the Advocacy Working Group and its Public Interest Task Force. As explained in other reports (included in the Board packet), the task force was created out of a strong desire among many members to organize a public relations campaign, in alliance with other groups, on the subject of the importance of saving the (rapidly shrinking) public domain and of maintaining a healthy "fair use" component of copyright law. As the task force started its work it became increasingly aware, first, of the difficulties of asserting overly specific positions that would be carried by the whole coalition and, second, of the need to build NINCH's own internal advocacy framework. As a result it was this task force that created a set of Copyright Principles that the whole coalition could carry, a Core Values statement to represent the underlying beliefs of the coalition, and an Advocacy Statement making it clear what advocacy meant, in practical terms, for NINCH.

Claire Muldoon had taken further steps to build a set of hyperlinks into the Core Values statement so that it would demonstrate and illustrate its terms through links to best examples and other statements in a wider context.

To carry its work of this year forward, the Advocacy Working Group proposed taking upon itself the task of creating the advocacy component of NINCH's next Strategic Plan.

c) Working Groups

David Green believed that the best mechanism for implementing member survey recommendations would be through working groups. In reviewing the current working groups, the executive director noted that the membership group (Duane Webster and Pat Williams) needed more members and a chair. He proposed two new working groups: one, chaired by Claire Muldoon of the Smithsonian Institution, to review community needs in the area of best practices and to produce whatever kinds of guides to best practices seemed appropriate; the other, still to be chaired, would be a visual arts group to convene those producing digital libraries of the work of contemporary visual artists to discuss best practices and technical and information standards to create more interoperable digital image libraries. Both of these groups need members: check the listing on their webpage for current status <http://www-ninch.cni.org/ADMIN/Working.html>.

The General Membership portion of the meeting concluded with a luncheon.

 

B. BOARD MEETING

1. PROCEDURAL

The Board Meeting commenced with two elections: Marc Pachter of the Smithsonian Institution was unanimously elected to commence a two-year term on the executive committee, taking the place of Deanna Marcum, who had completed her term of office. The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies was elected onto the Board, to fill one of the two slots for general members (the other is occupied by the Visual Resources Association).

After some discussion, the Board then unanimously voted to approve the Advocacy and Copyright Policy Statements. The Copyright Policy Statement was slightly amended and approved.

These deliberations also caused some discussion about NINCH's governance and procedures,which it was agreed should be one key component of the new Strategic Plan.

Joan Lippincott and Pat Williams were especially vocal about the need for re-thinking the current governance and management structure, simplifying it and loosening the connection between level of dues paid and position within a governance structure. General members needed to feel there was a way they could make a difference in the organization. Pat Williams made a key point that we should avoid the easy confusion between governance structure and lines of communication. She recommended that governance be simplified and communication lines broadened.

 

2. PLANNING THE FUTURE

Susan Fox recommended that the final results and analysis of the member survey should be included as raw material for the Strategic Plan.

All agreed on the value of forming a Strategic Plan Working Group. Members volunteering to serve are as follows: Susan Fox, Joan Lippincott/Clifford Lynch, Duane Webster, Sandria Freitag, Deanna Marcum, John D'Arms/Steve Wheatley, Chuck Henry, and David Green. Pat Williams agreed to chair this working group.

It was agreed that the three specific areas of work should be: Advocacy; Governance, Membership & Finance; and Program. The Advocacy Working Group, as part of its continuing work would develop the advocacy component of the overall plan. Susan Fox and Pat Williams would be members of both the advocacy and Strategic Plan working groups and this should assist in continuity between the two groups. The executive director agreed to draft a charge and circulate dates for the first meeting of the group. It was proposed that the first draft of the Strategic Plan should be ready by March 15 for an Spring Board meeting, date still to be decided.