Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 662.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
[1] From: NINCH-ANNOUNCE <david@ninch.org> (104)
Subject: "New-Model Scholarship: How Will It Survive?" Report
by CLIR
[2] From: NINCH-ANNOUNCE <david@ninch.org> (22)
Subject: "What Consumers Want in Digital Rights Management"
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 03 May 2003 07:02:58 +0100
From: NINCH-ANNOUNCE <david@ninch.org>
Subject: "New-Model Scholarship: How Will It Survive?" Report by CLIR
NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT
News on Networking Cultural Heritage Resources
from across the Community
May 2, 2003
Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Releases:
"New-Model Scholarship: How Will It Survive?"
http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub114abst.html.
Article on "New Model Scholarship" in CLIR ISSUES #3, by Abby Smith
http://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/issues33.html#symp
by Abby Smith
THE INTERNET HAS transformed the way in which scholarship is produced and
disseminated, most notably in the sciences. Digital technologies for
scholarly research, analysis, communication, and teaching have been adopted
more slowly in the humanities and social sciences, but there has been much
innovation in these fields as well. Libraries and special collecting
institutions are concerned about how to acquire, preserve, and make
accessible some of the digital content coming from historians, literary
scholars, and other humanists, as well as the primary sources in digital
format on which this scholarship is based.
Libraries face many challenges in ensuring long-term access to the
"new-model scholarship" that is born digital. This includes the variety of
Web sites and other desktop digital objects created on campuses that fall
somewhere short of "published" but are worthy of access in the future.
Humanists pose a special problem: they are adopting digital technologies to
create complex, often idiosyncratic digital objects that are in many ways
more challenging to preserve than scientific literature.
A new report from CLIR, entitled New-Model Scholarship: How Will It
Survive?, explores the following types of emerging scholarship:
* experimental: designed to develop and model a methodology for generating
recorded information about a historical event or an academic discipline
that might otherwise go undocumented. The History of Recent Science and
Technology program at the Dibner Institute has initiated several projects
of this nature.
* open-ended: generates digital objects that are intended to be added over
time. An example is George Mason University's 9/11 Project.
* interactive: gathers content through dynamic interactions among the
participants. The creators intend that the interactions, as well as the
content, are part of what is to be preserved. The Dibner Institute's
Physics of Scales project is an example.
* software-intensive: stipulates that the tools for using the data are as
important to preserve as is the content. The variety of software needed to
render dynamic three-dimensional models in the University of Virginia's
Monuments and Dust project illustrates the importance of preserving such tools.
* multimedia: creates information in a variety of genres-texts, time
lines, images, audio, and video-and file formats. George Mason University's
Center for New Media and History has developed several such sites for
research and teaching.
* unpublished: designed to be used and disseminated through the Web, yet
not destined to be published formally or submitted for peer review.
Libraries must determine what of this content has long-term value for
teaching and research. They must define the parameters of objects that
describe themselves as "open-ended" and "changing," decide what must be
done to make a complex digital object ready to place in a repository, and
determine how to support digital preservation over time.
Librarians, who are used to thinking about selecting and preserving
content, must now work closely with creators to identify attributes of the
resources that warrant preserving. This often entails preserving software
as well as content. Many of the new resources were designed as experiments,
and their creators neither expect nor want them to be kept forever.
Nonetheless, if longevity is to be considered, it is important that
creators work with librarians and archivists early on.
Several models of stewardship are emerging for resources that are worth
preserving. They can be roughly divided into two organizational types.
Enterprise-based models take some responsibility for keeping information
resources created by an institution or a discipline that are used primarily
by that community. The University of California, Harvard University,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University are
developing such repositories. Other enterprise-based models are seen in
various academic disciplines as well as among commercial and nonprofit
publishers. Few of these digital archives strive for long-term preservation
as defined by librarians and archivists. Most of the emerging models for
electronic publications serve other needs, such as lower-cost distribution
of and access to scholarly journals.
Community-based models offer third-party preservation services to digital
creators. None has developed so far to meet the needs of born-digital
scholarship, but both JSTOR and the Internet Archive offer interesting
models for future development.
Funders that support building digital resources, including federal funding
agencies, do not require the deposit of data into trustworthy digital
archives. This is a serious oversight that must be addressed. Equally
serious is the lack of planning and action by the universities and other
research institutions that support the creation of digital scholarship and
are its primary consumers.
Librarians, archivists, and digital scholars are well positioned to raise
awareness of this impending crisis of information loss and to articulate
the new roles and responsibilities to be assumed by each member of the
research community that has an interest in the future of scholarship.
New-Model Scholarship is available online at
http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub114abst.html. Print copies may be
ordered through CLIR's Web site.
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--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Sat, 03 May 2003 07:04:06 +0100 From: NINCH-ANNOUNCE <david@ninch.org> Subject: "What Consumers Want in Digital Rights Management"
NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT News on Networking Cultural Heritage Resources from across the Community May 2, 2003
AAP and ALA Release White Paper to Promote User-friendly DRM Products "What Consumers Want in Digital Rights Management (DRM): Making Content as Widely Available as Possible In Ways that Satisfy Consumer Preferences http://www.publishers.org/press/pdf/DRMWhitePaper.pdf
Not a position paper, this white paper jointly released by the The Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the American Library Association (ALA), offers a 60-page snapshot of e-book users' experiences and preferences, with a view to identifying those features that vendors should take account of in implementing Digital Rights Management software for e-books.
While specifically focused on e-books, the report may well have relevance for the wider deployment of DRM software, especially as it relates to practitioners' behavior and their requirements for the use and re-use of digital material.
David Green =========== [material deleted]
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