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The Informatics Services team recently released the results of two major projects: a major redesign and refactoring of CineFiles and the new Botanical Garden Plant Propagation Information web site. Hot off the presses, iNews has published an article (Campus collections: New systems for education and outreach) describing the systems and the importance of collaborative teams to their success.
UC Berkeley is home to numerous world-class museums, visual resource collections, archives, and other collecting institutions. While campus museums have always placed a strong emphasis on the stewarding and safekeeping of these collections and on fostering collections-based research, increasingly their role in education and public service has grown. Recently, IST released two systems that highlight this trend: CineFiles (for the PFA Library and Film Study Center within the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive) and the Botanical Garden Plant Propagation Information web system (for the UC Botanical Garden).
A meeting was held at King's College, London, on 26th and 27th October 2009, between representatives of the following networks, infrastructure projects, and planning initiatives working with digital technologies in the Arts and Humanities:
• arts-humanities.net (http://www.arts-humanities.net/)
• ADHO - Association of Digital Humanities Organisations (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/)
• CLARIN (http://www.clarin.eu/)
• centerNet (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/centernet/)
• DARIAH (http://www.dariah.eu/)
Project Bamboo published a proposed scope of work for its initial year of implementation work, begining in 2010. This work will support the broader Bamboo Program, for which a Planning Phase has been running since April 2008 (cf. http://projectbamboo.org).
The document describing this proposed scope of work is published on the Project Bamboo wiki at this URL:
https://wiki.projectbamboo.org/x/SYUHAQ
The document describes two fully functional “Product Deliverables”:
1. Enabling Technologies to Support Communities of Practice will allow scholars in the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences to describe their work, and to collaborate with technologists in generalizing workflows applicable across individual, disciplinary, and institutional practice; and then to collaborate in discussing, specifying, rating, and reviewing technology designed to support that practice.
2. Humanities Corpora and Curation Workspace, expected to be built on Collection Space services, is intended to support management, consideration, and dissemination of small collections, with particular emphasis on collections owned or held by individual scholars in the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences.
In addition, the proposal describes sets of services that will support and enhance these “products” and — beyond Project Bamboo’s first build iteration — will support additional tools, application packages, and service compositions that support humanist inquiry. Last, the proposal begins to describe a service delivery platform (the infrastructural software technology on which services will run) for all the above, and the principles and processes that will guide its development and evolution.
The proposed scope has been released to the Project Bamboo community for review and feedback, and will serve as the basis of a funding proposal to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to be submitted in January 2010.
Project Bamboo has moved into its latest phase with the drafting of the year one Bamboo Technology Proposal to the Mellon RIT Program. We are now focusing in much more detail on Bamboo's technical deliverables. From now through November, we will be publishing iterative drafts of the Bamboo Technology Proposal, and contacting institutions and organizations who have communicated partnership or membership interest in Bamboo to clarify future contributions and roles.