agenda item

[John Unsworth]

Tone Merete,

Could you add one item to the board's agenda for the May meeting?

--Future grant plans and possibilities for the Consortium

At present, one third of our income is from the NEH grant; this is a 
two-year grant, and we are entering its second year.  I hope board members 
will come with some ideas about future grant-funding for the Consortium, 
where it might come from, what sort of activities could be funded, etc..

On that subject, we have not yet missed the 2002 deadline for filing the 
(optional) letter of intent for this program:

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2002/nsf02085/nsf02085.html

      Estimated Number of Awards: Up to 10 per year
      Anticipated Funding Amount: Up to $10,000,000 in FY2002 pending the 
availability of funds.

Full proposals due May 27th.  The NSF introductory description follows; I 
think an application could be made by TEI, mustering the repositories 
involved in our NEH project as a testbed (and others, certainly, beyond 
those), applying research funds to the resolution of the question the 
Council posed for itself at its first meeting--namely, the extension and 
interoperability of TEI with respect to other standards, particularly 
metadata standards, but also others (linking, or example), and perhaps 
tossing in the Granby research that Brown and Virginia area already 
involved in, as an architecture for searching and delivering distributed 
TEI resources (see more on Granby at 
http://busa.village.virginia.edu/granbydocs/granby.html; this project 
includes developing an open-source XML search engine).  Perhaps we drag the 
Open Archives Initiative in here (http://www.openarchives.org/) maybe by 
partnering with Michigan?  Maybe some conflict there with Xpat and an open 
source XML search engine...but I'm just thinking out loud.    I think the 
PI would have to be US-based, but I think the TEI Consortium itself could 
qualify; if so, then a European Board member interested in pushing this 
forward would be welcome to do so; if not, then it would have to fall to 
someone other than me, though IATH could help with actually preparing and 
filing the proposal--I have my hands more than full between now and the end 
of May.

Other suggestions welcome at the board meeting; meanwhile, here's the NSF 
Introduction to this program:

International digital libraries research is intended to contribute to the 
fundamental knowledge required to create
information systems that can operate in multiple languages, formats, media, 
and social and organizational contexts.
International collaborative research can bring complementary approaches, 
resources and perspectives to bear on
common needs and information technology research challenges.

International digital libraries applications testbeds are intended to build 
operational prototypes for globally distributed,
internet-based resources, and to implement these in a variety of 
applications contexts. The testbeds are expected to
advance technologies across the digital libraries lifecycle, focus 
collective work on organizing domain-specific content,
and engage researchers, scholars, students and teachers in enhancing 
research and knowledge resources in a variety of
subject domains.

The program's goal is to advance the creation and access to internet-based 
digital content, regardless of location,
information content or form, and thus enable broad use for research, 
education, commerce and other societal
purposes. Developing global information environments requires international 
collaborative efforts in many areas:

* identifying collections of information which is not accessible or usable 
because of technical barriers, distance, size,
system fragmentation or other limits;

* creating interoperable technologies for federation and retrieval of many 
kinds of information;

* understanding and developing new technologies to make it possible for 
such information to be organized and
delivered to and/or exploited by a distributed sets of users in 
collaborative settings;

* building testbeds to evaluate new technology in international contexts 
and to measure the benefits gained along
various dimensions;

* resolving intellectual property issues in complex global marketplaces;

* developing linked, compatible databases with inherently regional 
information, such as databases of geographic,
botanic, agricultural, demographic or economic data;

* reaching agreement on methods and standards for ensuring long-term 
sustainability and interoperability among
distributed and separately administered databases; and,

* implementing preservation and archiving practices for domain-specific and 
other content.

While there are now uncoordinated efforts in many countries to build 
digital libraries, cooperative research and testbed
activities can help avoid duplication of effort, prevent the development of 
non-interoperable digital systems, and
encourage productive interchange of scientific knowledge and scholarly data 
around the world.

This NSF effort will fund the U. S. portion of collaborative digital 
library projects among investigators from different
countries to foster long-term, sustainable relationships between U.S. and 
non-U.S. researchers and research
organizations. Cooperating groups in supported projects are expected to be 
balanced in terms of level of effort and
expertise, and demonstrate the benefits obtainable from complementary 
international research. The research strengths
and unique resources of organizations in different countries should be 
combined to facilitate work on complex
multi-faceted problems relating to the access and use of internationally 
distributed, multilingual and multimedia content.