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 Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), an independent nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., supports higher education and advanced research primarily through programs in academic libraries and allied institutions. CLIR convenes meetings to articulate concerns shared across multiple communities; commissions and publishes reports on topics of interest to the library and information research communities; provides support for graduate students and recent graduates of doctoral programs in the humanities; and runs the annual Frye Institute in cooperation with Emory University to train future leaders of college and university libraries.  

CLIR's agenda for the next five years reflects past and ongoing transformations resulting from advances in information and communication technologies. It has six interdependent components: cyberinfrastructure, preservation, scholarly methodologies, future library, leadership and new models of research. Cyberinfrastructure establishes a foundation that enables modes of technology-mediated research and models of scholarship. Computationally-intensive research methods and associated models of scholarship occasion needs for new leadership as well as new institutional roles for libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage institutions. These organizations will be key to managing the enormous quantities of data, which has resulted from technology-intensive investigations together with related forms of scholarly expression. CLIR's long-standing commitment to curation and preservation of analog and digital data positions the organization to take a leadership role in ongoing national discussions. CLIR is deeply committed to identifying strategic approaches and partnerships that leverage social, intellectual and organizational resources across institutional and disciplinary boundaries on behalf of the public good. 

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.

LINK: http://politicstalk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@424.c9CMbu8k7E9.5@.775e9244/48

Tessa Jowell, the UK secretary of state for culture, media and sport, has weighed in on the blogging code of conduct debate from a few weeks back, stating that she welcomes and supports the initiative. From her article "Civility in 'Ourspace' " on The Guardian's website: "The wonderful, anarchic, creative world of the blogosphere shouldn't be a licence for abuse, bullying and threats as it has been in some disturbing cases...There is a need for serious discussion about maintaining civilised parameters for debate, so that more people - and women and older people in particular - feel comfortable to participate."

 Editor's note: URL has been updated to show proceedings from the conference. 9/3/07

 

International HASTAC Conference
 "Electronic Techtonics:  Thinking at the Interface”
April 19-21, 2007

HASTAC ( "haystack”—Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) is now soliciting papers and panel proposals for "Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface,” its first international conference. The interdisciplinary conference will be held April 19-21, 2007, in Durham, North Carolina, co-sponsored by Duke University and RENCI (Renaissance Computing Institute). Details concerning registration fees, hotel accommodations, and the full conference agenda will be posted to http://www.hastac.org as they become available.

Highlights include a keynote address by John Seely Brown (The Social Life of Information), a talk by legal theorist James Boyle (co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Creative Commons, and Science Commons), a conversation among leaders of innovative digital humanities projects led by John Unsworth (chair of the ACLS "Cyberinfrastructure and the Humanities and Social Sciences” commission), and a presentation by media artist and research pioneer Rebecca Allen. The conference will also include refereed scholarly and scientific papers, multimedia performances, an exhibit hall of innovative software and hardware, plus tours of art and scientific installations in virtual reality, learning-game, and interactive sensor space environments.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Six sessions will be devoted to panels with refereed papers on spects of "interface” spanning media arts, engineering, and the human, social, natural, and computational sciences.  Panels will be topical and cross-disciplinary; they will be comprised of papers that are themselves interdisciplinary as well as specialized disciplinary papers presented in juxtaposition with one another.
 
Deadline for Proposals:  December 1, 2006.