Though I’m way late in doing so, I did want to just introduce my project to the folks here before we all converge (if only hours before). I don’t think it’s covering any drastically new ground but maybe ties in to a number of the different conversational threads that have been going through these posts. I’m happy to demo what we’ve got this weekend, but equally happy to watch & learn from the audience.

Encyclopedia Virginia is a new project of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Quite a few different state and regional encyclopedia projects have cropped up over the past decade; EV is one of the first to do so with a mandate to create entirely new entry content instead of simply publishing online a preexisting print encyclopedia.

We got charged, as I’m sure most of you have been, with creating a web project that would take advantage of the latest & greatest web technologies while also building itself for longterm sustainability (seeing as how an in-depth state encyclopedia like ours could be 10 years in content development alone, so we’ve got to have technology that can nimbly adjust to changing web standards, trends, etc.).

To that end, we’re borrowing a few tricks from digital libraries and archives, and encoding our entries in TEI. In some sense it’s overkill — this content is all digitally-born, so much of TEI’s capabilities w/r/t annotating archival manuscript is lost here. Hopefully, what it empowers down the road is some interoperability between EV content and other regional encyclopedia or digital library content, and some small immunity to the changing web trends over the long course of our content development.

We’ve built a custom CMS that ingests TEI and strips out various elements into your standard MySQL database for web delivery. We perform a similar task for our media objects, creating METS records for each object which the CMS ingests and strips apart. While, again, this in some ways constitutes quite a bit of overkill, it makes more sense when we try to think about the project as both an online encyclopedia and a digital library, and we’re hoping that the flexibility and openness offered by XML will reap benefits for us down the road.

So, a few different things I’d love to talk about over the course of the weekend (not including all of the great things I’ve already read — my curiosity and interest are piqued!):

1. What is our responsibility vis-a-vis creating content that is accessible with the technologies of both today and tomorrow? How do we build digital creations that can themselves be lasting archives?
2. Are archival standards like TEI and METS appropriate for digitally-born content? Obviously, EV is doing this, but I don’t think it’s a given that it’s always the right choice.
3. (one close to my heart) What is the responsibility of digital archives w/r/t copyright and intellectual property? I manage EV’s media objects, finding things we can use in all kinds of archives, and struggle with this every day — as I try to get as many objects as possible delivered to the public, without getting sued. What role can humanities institutions and projects play in this culture battle? I think particularly there may be some overlap with the interest in Creative Commons that was expressed earlier.

See you on Saturday!

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