16.662 new on WWW: reports on online scholarship, digital rights

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk)
Date: Sat May 03 2003 - 02:12:32 EDT

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                   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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