0.11 Response to roger bagnall paper: integrating digital papyrology  (Page 10/10)

I am struggling to think of a single project in the humanities that meets this standard. Even NINES and its relatives, which in many respects is very close to the model I give here, does not make available all the metadata on which it is built (or if it does, I could not find it). NINES will let you have Collex, which you can then use to make your own interfaces into the NINES metadata—but it appears the metadata itself is unavailable.

I can foresee numerous objections. Let’s deal with three. First, one could assert that the PubMed Central model does not apply to us. We don’t have just pdfs: we have XML files, images, and massively varied metadata. I don’t think this is a valid objection: standard digital library systems can handle all this. There is work—a great deal of work—to be done on metadata standards, which is still the Wild West of our discipline. But we can do this, and enough is there already to start.

Second, one could object that funding agencies never provide, and can never provide, sufficient funding to meet the full cost both of digitization and of providing access for perpetuity. Accordingly, we need to withhold open access as I have outlined it for at least part of the digital materials we make, so that we can sustain access by charging for exclusive access to key materials. Open access and availability as I have outlined it will undermine this and destroy the business model. Large resource-holding institutions (some of them publicly funded bodies) have been eager to promote this argument, and the funding agencies have been, in my view, too ready to accept it. I propose a simple experiment. Let the funding agencies, for a period at least, mandate that funding for digital projects must follow the open-access model I here outline. There will certainly be many institutions which can work to the conditions I outline. When funding starts to flow to these institutions, other institutions will revise their viewpoint.

Third, most substantively: I am proposing, across the whole humanities, a shift to a model of access that has (so far as I know) not been implemented fully in even one project—not even, yet, in any of my own. Further, success depends on excellent metadata. As I observe above, metadata remains the most unruly area of our work, with the freedom with which one can create, for example, RDF implementations leading to a proliferation of competing ontologies. Also, large-scale web-based systems for searching the billions of metadata records we will have are comparatively new. One might also contest my advocacy of RDF as the best way forward, and I think we should expect that we need also to handle other metadata formats, such as Topic Maps and ISOCat. But if no-one is quite doing yet what I describe, many are very close. I’ve mentioned the NINES and the DISCOVERY projects: these projects already have large collections of data and metadata in forms which would make possible full implementation of what I have suggested. From the other direction, we are seeing a burgeoning development of web-based tools for analysis, comparison and visualization: thus the TAPoR suite in Canada, the TextGrid tools in Germany, and many more on websites everywhere. These tools need more and better intelligent data available to them. We have the data, but it is not smart enough yet for the tools to find it, and it is too often locked away. We can bridge this gap. Finally, I do not propose the nuclear option: that funding agencies and other bodies should instantly mandate that all projects henceforward should follow these rules. Rather, let us see a few projects implement this fully. If I am right, the benefits will be so manifest that others will follow.

I see now that my response is much longer than the paper to which it is responding. Perhaps that is the best tribute I could pay to Bagnall’s paper, and to the many years of remarkable work in the papyrology projects which lie behind his paper. If my paper can help us learn from the best Bagnall and the papyrologists can teach us, it will have served its purpose. If the conference participants can take something from this forward into their own work, the conference will have served its purpose.