>> Guide to Good Practice WHY DOES THE CULTURAL COMMUNITY NEED BEST PRACTICES? Why We Want to Create Digital Resources Useful to All the Humanities Creating and Managing Content: ENABLE CONTENT CREATION LEVERAGE INVESTMENT Providing Access to Content: FACILITATE USE IMPROVE RESEARCH RESULTS IMPLICATIONS FOR THIS PROJECT Creating and Managing Content Best Practices... ENABLE CONTENT CREATION create a body of digital material to support advanced research in the humanities; enable the combination of source materials from multiple repositories or digitization projects (with some kind of hope for comparability); produce comparable results from projects in different circumstances; support preservation efforts by creating standardized products that can be managed in a consistent and therefore economical and predicatable way; ensure predicatability in digital source material made available for study; make assumptions of digitization explicit, to enable the evaluation of the results; assist in the preservation and longevity of information, by developing coherence in "digital archives." LEVERAGE INVESTMENT best practices reduce redundancy of effort; add value efficiently; ensure investment in digitization creates content of broadest use (biggest bang for the buck); produce economies of scale; maximize the benefit of digitization projects (greatest good); give best results for least investment (through tested methods and processes).   Providing Access to Content Best Practices... FACILITATE USE ensure the reuse of primary materials beyond the context within which they were first digitized; encourage interdisciplinarity (e.g.William Blake Archive, where art history and literature intersect), reuse and interchange of information across disciplines, methodological boundaries and institutional types; IMPROVE RESEARCH RESULTS enable scholars to focus on the research questions rather than on the technology; develop technological literacy among the academy essential to ensure validity of results that rely on technology; support scholarship, by reducing the possibility that technological artefacts will influence research results; ensure that research results are replicable, and that future research can build on past discoveries. IMPLICATIONS FOR THIS PROJECT articulating our own assumptions of what is "best" will further our understanding of the digital resources the cultural community is creating; developing a rigorous and self-conscious methodology is essential for evaluating existing practices; well articulated guidelines must be tested beyond the domains in which they were created; neutral recommendations whenever possibe will enable the broadest possible use. ======================================================== methods and perspectives embodied in content need to be expressed explicitly; data must have broad or documented tolerances to be used beyond the domain of its creation;