1	Aquifer & ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure Overlaps and complements October 25 2004 DLF Forum Baltimore
2	Aquifer Goals Surface high-quality online scholarly collections of DLF institutions Focus on interoperability, collaboration Commit to action, share resources Develop an applied research agenda
3	ACLS Cyberinfrastructure Commission: Preliminary Directions Humanities data are not developed by the scholars, but out of experience (performances, books, films, recordings, etc.) Humanists find meaning in the record of human behavior and activity IT doesn’t change the purpose of their work as it does in the sciences Problem of credit for collaborative, non-traditional research needs to be worked out within the disciplines One potential breakthrough : collaboration tools for use of content
4	More ACLS Findings General public (not humanities scholars) is driving transformation to provide greater access to digital humanities information “That which is not digitized will soon not be found or used” (n.b., libraries, archives, museums) Difficult to build a tractable business model for digitization of humanities materials (current user domain can often be an N of 1, but potential use is difficult to predict) Encumbrances to data access (copyright, privacy issues) a significant impediment to humanities & social science scholarship and instruction
5	Overlaps: Aquifer & ACLS Commission Need tools for collection aggregation, content analysis, collaboration Use environments and infrastructure that enable “trusted” use of copyrighted content (Sakai, Shibboleth) Keep digitizing!!! Libraries are supply side, users demand side; will similar tools sets help both groups? Simplify metadata schemes and requirements, but not everywhere (best practices, mapping, automatic metadata generation and enrichment) Simplify discovery and access entry points (OAI) Enable our content to surface in many environments (Sakai, Google, etc.) Enable export from the back-end of portals Enable persistent identification of digital content
6	What does Aquifer mean to you? Surface your collections How are you prepared to contribute? Metadata: embrace OAI/DLF best practices Increasingly prescriptive pref’s & standards Everything, pref. MODS, MARC-XML Sets and set descriptions Coverage and date Validation and analysis of metadata (3^rd party)
7	Tool Development Develop Tools registry Track tool development for using content across domains (e.g, IMS) Metadata harvesting, normalization, enrichment: Standards and best practices for data providers and service providers implementing OAI Develop methods to work with canonical metadata formats Web services that focus on metadata normalization Language transformation tools IMS course management : extracting and using metadata, content, and repositing the content
8	Tool development & users Develop for scholars? Let them build their own? Work collaboratively with them Library tools may be useful for scholars too
9	More Tools Tools for enrichment, mining of metadata Taxonomies and automatic selection Learn from work in other environments How to leverage rich traditional vocabulary work with current tool development? Tools for automatic metadata creation
10	Strategic areas for Aquifer work Use Collections Tools Registries