The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local institutions and organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; to enhance learning and innovation; and to support professional development.  

In the Knowledge Society of the 21st Century, digital content will be created, managed, preserved and disseminated within an infrastructure that is seamless and virtually invisible to users. The future digital environment will include digital representations of accumulated historical knowledge as well as vast amounts of new content. Future generations of users will build on this existing information and preserved digital content to create new knowledge and forms of expression. Libraries, museums, and archives are vital components of the emerging cyberinfrastructure.  

Cultural heritage institutions are developing digital repositories to manage and preserve collections converted from analog formats as well as those that are digital-only. They are also leading efforts to develop tools, standards, and best practices to improve the management, discovery, presentation, and use of digital content. IMLS provides grant opportunities to libraries, museums, archives, and institutions of higher education for research, demonstrationl, and implementation projects to enhance library and museum services and for programs to educate the next generations of library and museum professionals. IMLS grant programs that support cyberinfrastructure include:

National Leadership Grants

• Research and Demonstration Projects
• Building Digital Resources
• Library and Museum Collaborations
• Collaborative Planning Grants

Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program

The American Council of Learned Societies seeks to advance humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and social sciences and to maintain and strengthen relations among the national societies devoted to such studies. Established in 1919 as a federation of 12 learned societies, ACLS has grown since its founding to represent 69 scholarly organizations, embracing all fields of the humanities and related social sciences, and totaling approximately 300,000 scholars. As the pre-eminent private representative of humanities scholarship in the United States, the ACLS carries out its mission in a variety of programs across many fields of learning. 

The ACLS has developed and administered numerous specific programs that have served the interests of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences in general, of individual scholars, and of the nation. Central to the ACLS throughout its history have been its programs of fellowships and grants to support research in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. ACLS's international programs both promote the study of world areas and provide opportunities for scholars for research and scholarly exchange.

ACLS's support of humanities research naturally includes concern for the cycle of scholarly communication upon which the researcher enterprise depends. The ACLS Conference of Administrative Officers--the convocation of the executive directors of the Council's member societies--has scholarly communication and the digital promise as an established thread of its conversations. Since 1950, the ACLS has issued a major report each decade on some aspect of the scholarly communication cycle: libraries, publishing, and new information technologies. In 2004, the ACLS appointed a commission of digitally-engaged scholars and charged it to recommend how the humanities and social sciences could develop online research environments that would empower scholars and students. The commission worked over two years to present a guide to achieving that goal. The report, entitled Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Final Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences, was released December 13, 2006 in print and online versions.

The ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB), which launched in September 2002, is a digital collection of over 1,500 full-text titles offered by the ACLS in collaboration with twelve learned societies, nearly 90 contributing publishers, and librarians at the University of Michigan's Scholarly Publishing Office. HEB now adds approximately 300 books annually to the collection, as well as a carefully selected list of new XML titles that have the potential to use web-based technologies to communicate the results of scholarship in new ways. 

The Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, working in collaboration with the Cyberinfrastructure Partnership (CIP) between the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), is leading an NSF-sponsored publication effort called Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch (CTWatch). The goal of CTWatch is to establish an online forum for ideas and opinions on topics of importance to the cyberinfrastructure community, providing a new source of information and analysis concerning the latest innovations in cyberinfrastructure technology.

To create the kind of productive mix of news, information and dialogue that rapid progress in shared cyberinfrastructure today requires, CTWatch developed CTWatch Quarterly, an on-line serial publication modeled on a more traditional academic journal. CTWatch Quarterly is designed to be published on-line and is made available in both HTML and in a high-quality PDF format intended for printing on demand. Each issue of revolves around a particular area of interest for the cyberinfrastructure community and is organized by a guest editor who is a leader in that field.

The focus topics (and corresponding guest editors) for 2006-7 included:

HASTAC is a virtual university. It is a voluntary international network that spans disciplines, institutions, the boundary of higher education and K-12, libraries, museums and other civic and community institutions. It includes top research universities, underfunded community colleges, HBCU's and other minority-serving institutions, as well as supercomputing centers, grid computing centers and major scientific research labs in the U.S. and abroad. HASTAC is pronounced "haystack" and is an acronym for Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. Since 2003, HASTAC has been developing tools for multimedia archiving and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative educational programs in information science and information studies, virtual museums and other digital projects. HASTAC leaders have served as consultants to U.S. and international organizations and governments on grid computing and cyberinfrastructure.

In 2006-07, over eighty HASTAC centers worked together to produce courses, seminars, workshops and public events on the theme of "In|Formation." Topics in that theme were: InCommon, Interplay, InCommunity, Interaction, Injustice, Integration, Interface and Innovation. The project for 2007-08 is a series of ad hoc podcast Town Halls on any topic of social and political importance to new technologies. All podcasts will be advertised and archived on the HASTAC website. In addition, in 2007-08, HASTAC will host the Digital Media and Learning Competition, a $2 million competition sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of its initiative on Digital Media and Learning. To become part of HASTAC, simply register to the http://www.hastac.org/ website and contribute.

Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg are cofounders of HASTAC.

centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers in which individuals contribute time and energy to help each other find opportunities and collaborators, and share tools and resources. The network serves to strengthen the position of centers in their own institutions as well as to advance digital humanities generally. centerNet developed from a meeting hosted by the NEH and the University of Maryland, College Park, April 12-13, 2007 in Washington, D.C., and is a response to the ACLS report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, published in 2006.

Since its inception in April, centerNet has added over a hundred members worldwide. A start-up committee elected at the NEH meeting, consisting of Julia Flanders, Neil Fraistat, Mark Kornbluh, Matt Kirschenbaum and John Unsworth, is currently adding international members to its ranks.

The centerNet website can be used to find information about jobs, grants, conferences and software. The centerNet email list can be asked for advice about everything from problems related to starting a center to problems in programming. The centerNet wiki provides a taxonomic listing of digital humanities centers through which international partners can be located--for a staff exchange or for a grant application, for example. Members of the network can post to the list or include an entry for their center on the wiki.

We invite all those who believe that their center is a digital humanities center, in whole or in part, to join the network. We intend the definition of "digital humanities" to be inclusive, with cross-over into the social sciences, media studies, digital arts and other related areas. This might include humanities centers with a strong interest in or focus on digital platforms. The definition of "center" is only slightly more prescriptive: a center should be larger than a single project, and it should have some history or promise of persistence. Those interested in finding out more about the network or in becoming a member should visit: http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/.

A discussion of cyberinfrastructure would be incomplete without noting the Mellon Foundation; their grants have made possible many of the advances covered within Academic Commons.

 From their website:

"The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation currently makes grants in six core program areas: Higher Education and Scholarship; Scholarly Communications; Research in Information Technology; Museums and Art Conservation; Performing Arts; Conservation and the Environment."

"Within each of its core programs, the Foundation concentrates most of its grantmaking in a few areas. Institutions and programs receiving support are often leaders in fields of Foundation activity, but they may also be promising newcomers, or in a position to demonstrate new ways of overcoming obstacles to achieve program goals."

The Open Content Alliance (OCA), created in 2005 to bring books and other material online, currently comprises more than 80 members--universities, public libraries, and commercial companies working together and embracing the values of openness central to the tradition of the creation of the Internet. Our goal is to build a digital archive of global content for universal access.

For thousands of years, humans have been putting their knowledge in books to pass on for future generations. Today, we have to have these materials in digital form, and we have to have them in a form where we can access and use them in new and different ways, as an engine for research, learning, and discovery, even if in ways not originally intended. I think that so far, as a culture, we have been negligent in our responsibility to perform this task: not because we don't have the materials, but because we haven't put them into the formats that new generations expect.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent grant-making agency of the United States government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation and public programs in the humanities.

We have recently launched the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI)--aimed at supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology. DHI is particularly interested in helping the development of cyberinfrastructure for the humanities as described in Our Cultural Commonwealth, the ACLS report on cyberinfrastructure.

The Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR) is a software engineering project that is leveraging the latest informatics research to innovate essential technology for a cyberinfrastructure for the humanities. Under the direction of Michael Welge, Loretta Auvil and John Unsworth, the SEASR team is developing software that:

• enhances humanities researchers' ability to use digital humanities applications for knowledge discovery, and
• provides digital humanities developers with an improved environment for advancing and innovating applications.  

SEASR's software research and development environment will enable existing applications (e.g., Wordhoard; Nora; MONK: Metadata Offer New Knowledge; IMIRSEL: International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory) to more actively, precisely and comprehensively analyze information extracted from large collections in a variety of formats (i.e., digital libraries, databases, archives, mixed media, and even custom data). SEASR offers a range of data synthesis improvements, from focused data retrieval and data integration, to intelligent human-computer interactions for knowledge access, to semantic data enrichment, to entity and relationship discovery, to knowledge discovery and hypothesis generation.  

Lorcan Dempsey points us to an important draft report from the
Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control that emphasizes the crucial need to enable smart connections between currently separate silos of cataloging. Here's the heart of the project:

Different communities of bibliographic practice have grown up around different resource types: library collections of books and journals, archives, journal articles, and museum objects and images. As these resources and others become increasingly accessible through the Web, separation of the communities of practice that manage them is no longer desirable, sustainable, or functional. Bibliographic control is increasingly a matter of managing relationships—among works, names, concepts, and object descriptions—across communities. Consistency of description within any single environment, such as the library catalog, is becoming less significant than the ability to make connections between environments: Amazon to WorldCat to Google to PubMed to Wikipedia, with library holdings serving as but one node in this web of connectivity. In today's environment, bibliographic control cannot continue to be seen as limited to library catalogs. [Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control PDF]