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

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support the ma<strong>in</strong> activity of humanities researchers, the attempt to establish the mean<strong>in</strong>g of
textual and other human created resources (Blanke 2010).
Blanke also reported that DARIAH is be<strong>in</strong>g built on exist<strong>in</strong>g national <strong>in</strong>frastructures and will
consequently be “embedded” among service providers that are already <strong>in</strong> place to ensure the bestpossible
chances of success.
Digital Humanities Observatory
The Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO) 757 is a digital humanities “collaboratory work<strong>in</strong>g with
Humanities Serv<strong>in</strong>g Irish Society (HSIS), national, European, and <strong>in</strong>ternational partners to further e-
scholarship.” Founded <strong>in</strong> 2008, DHO was created to support digital humanities research <strong>in</strong> Ireland and
help manage the creation and preservation of digital resources. The DHO will focus on three ma<strong>in</strong>
issues <strong>in</strong> the next few years: “encourag<strong>in</strong>g collaboration; provid<strong>in</strong>g for the management, access, and
preservation of project data; and promulgat<strong>in</strong>g shared standards and technology for project
development”(Schreibman et al. 2009). The DHO has po<strong>in</strong>ted out that the expectations of digital
humanities centers are rapidly chang<strong>in</strong>g and that plans for long-term viability need to be created from
the very beg<strong>in</strong>n<strong>in</strong>g of development.
Schreibman et al. noted that the creation of the DHO is <strong>in</strong> l<strong>in</strong>e with other grow<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>itiatives such as
Project Bamboo and DARIAH, where digital humanities projects are mov<strong>in</strong>g away from “digital silos”
to an approach where scholarly resources will be “l<strong>in</strong>ked, <strong>in</strong>teroperable, reusable, and preserved.” The
DHO is creat<strong>in</strong>g three “dist<strong>in</strong>ct but <strong>in</strong>tegrated <strong>in</strong>frastructures”: (1) a portal that will serve as the public
face of the DHO and is based on the Drupal 758 content management system; (2) DRAPIER (Digital
Research and Practices <strong>in</strong> Ireland), which is also based on Drupal and will serve as a framework for
public discovery of digital projects <strong>in</strong> Ireland; and (3) an “access and preservation repository based on
Fedora.” Some resources created by HSIS partners of the DHO will reside <strong>in</strong> their Fedora repository
while others will be federated <strong>in</strong> Fedora <strong>in</strong>stances managed by DHO partners.
DRIVER
DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) 759 is a “multi-phase effort
whose vision and primary objective is to establish a cohesive, pan-European <strong>in</strong>frastructure of digital
repositories, offer<strong>in</strong>g sophisticated functionality services to both researchers and the general public.”
At the end of its first stage <strong>in</strong> November 2007, the DRIVER project provided access to a testbed
system that produced a search portal with open-access content from over 70 repositories. The DRIVER
efforts <strong>in</strong>itially concentrated on the <strong>in</strong>frastructure aspect and developed “clearly def<strong>in</strong>ed <strong>in</strong>terfaces to
the content network, which allow any qualified service-provider to build services on top of it.” 760 As
of March 2010, the DRIVER search portal offered access to more than 2.5 million publications from
249 repositories <strong>in</strong> 39 countries. In its current stage, DRIVER II seeks to expand its geographic
coverage, support more advanced end user functionality for search<strong>in</strong>g complex digital objects, and
provide access to a greater variety of open-access materials.
757 http://dho.ie/
758 http://drupal.org/
759 http://www.driver-repository.eu/
760 http://www.driver-repository.eu/Driver-About/About-DRIVER.html