Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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a distributed network of content and services” (Choudhury 2008). Choudhury concluded that for
<strong>in</strong>stitutional and consequently digital repositories to be successful they would need to def<strong>in</strong>e
themselves as one part of the larger cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure, not as the <strong>in</strong>frastructure.
An additional challenge for creat<strong>in</strong>g an <strong>in</strong>teroperable <strong>in</strong>frastructure is that many <strong>in</strong>dividual digital
humanities applications or tools are very specialized and do not support even limited <strong>in</strong>teroperability.
One means of address<strong>in</strong>g this problem, accord<strong>in</strong>g to Stephen Nichols, would to design more digital
projects to be “tool-agnostic”:
Rather than creat<strong>in</strong>g tools specifically for a given set of material, one can make platforms toolagnostic:
mean<strong>in</strong>g simply that the site is designed to accommodate varied content. The capacity
of a site to host multiple projects <strong>in</strong>vites collaboration among scholarly groups who would
otherwise each be putt<strong>in</strong>g up its own separate site. This <strong>in</strong> turn will promote scholarly
communication and collaboration …<strong>in</strong> short, true <strong>in</strong>teroperability. Technically such a model is
not difficult to achieve; the problem lies elsewhere: <strong>in</strong> conv<strong>in</strong>c<strong>in</strong>g scholars and IT professionals
to th<strong>in</strong>k imag<strong>in</strong>atively and proactively by creat<strong>in</strong>g an ‘ecumenical’ platform for their orig<strong>in</strong>al
content, i.e. one that is general <strong>in</strong> its extent and application (Nichols 2009).
Cohen et al. (2009) made similar criticisms of the limited amount of tool <strong>in</strong>teroperability, not<strong>in</strong>g that
despite the existence of various standards and methods, most tools have been built as “one-off,
standalone web applications or pieces of software.” Other issues they listed were the <strong>in</strong>ability to import
and export between tools and the difficulty of connect<strong>in</strong>g different tools that perform the same task,
cit<strong>in</strong>g as an example the vast proliferation of annotation software over the last five years (e.g., Co-
Annotea, Pl<strong>in</strong>y, Zotero). Compound<strong>in</strong>g the problem is that most digital tools work only with limited
content collections, often because digital collections lack any way of communicat<strong>in</strong>g with tools such as
an API.
In terms of creat<strong>in</strong>g larger VREs for the humanities, Voss and Procter have similarly argued that any
successful VRE will need to <strong>in</strong>clude both generic and repurposable components that can be used
widely. They believed that most research is <strong>in</strong>deed head<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> that direction: “A wide range of
commoditised components and systems are available,” Voss and Proctor expla<strong>in</strong>ed, “and efforts are
underway to develop <strong>in</strong>teroperability frameworks to foster flexible <strong>in</strong>tegration to form seamless
collaborative work environments” (Voss and Procter 2009).
The VRE-SDM has followed this approach by mak<strong>in</strong>g use of open-source tools wherever possible
(e.g., for annotation and for document view<strong>in</strong>g) and of an exist<strong>in</strong>g VRE tool, the uPortal framework 712
(Bowman et al. 2010). They have used this framework to ensure <strong>in</strong>teroperability with other VREs and
virtual learn<strong>in</strong>g environments (VLE) for it allows them to reuse portlets from other projects and also
makes their own components easier to reuse. This framework can be customized by users, who can
compile their own <strong>in</strong>terfaces us<strong>in</strong>g portlets that offer the tools and services they want. They are us<strong>in</strong>g
other, newer standards (<strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g Google gadget/OpenSocial) 713 to support the <strong>in</strong>tegration of various
components. “This means that <strong>in</strong> the long-term the VRE will be able to provide tools to researchers
across the humanities,” Bowman et al. (2010) proposed; “some, such as the view<strong>in</strong>g and annotation
tools, will be relevant to the broadest range of scholars, while other more specialist tools can be added
by <strong>in</strong>dividual users or groups as and when needed” (Bowman et al. 2010, 96). As an example, they
proposed that the VRE-SDM could deploy both its own tools and those of eSAD to explore collections
712 http://www.jasig.org/uportal
713 http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial