Scholars in the humanities and social sciences should work with librarians, curators, publishers, andtechnologists to develop tools for producing, searching, analyzing, vetting, and representing knowledge, as well as standards fordocumenting data of all kinds. For hundreds of years, the most important tools of humanists and social scientists were pen orbrush and paper. Today, scholars require a range of digital toolsfor research, teaching, and writing, including tools for finding, filtering and reviewing, processing and organizing, annotating,analyzing, and visualizing digital information. Even though we can point to current efforts in many of these areas, lack ofcoordination among them is a problem: a great deal of tool building is done on a local scale, and this results in unnecessaryredundancy of effort.
In part, this is because academic software developers may be prohibited by their university counsels fromparticipating in open-source communities such as SourceForge (not because of any university opposition to open-source but, instead,because of statutory prohibitions against accepting the terms of use that these communities impose, especially regarding issues suchas indemnification and governing law in the resolution of disputes). In that case, it is incumbent on the universitycommunity to provide and encourage the use of a parallel community infrastructure for open-source software development, in order toavoid duplication of effort and ensure that tool builders in academic settings are not specially disadvantaged compared withtool builders outside universities. Such an effort could begin with a consortium of major universities (for example, the Committee onInstitutional Cooperation) licensing the SourceForge software and then making it available for use by academic open-source softwaredevelopers on acceptable terms.
Tools developed in one discipline may frequently be transferable or adaptable to other disciplines, butscholars may be unaware of tools developed outside their own discipline. Libraries, archives, and museums are positioned toserve as bridges among the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and arts in integrating widely disparate information and buildingnew interdisciplinary relationships. The library of the University of California, Riverside, for example, is conducting research aimedat producing better machine-based, automatically generated metadata to improve the search and retrieval of multidisciplinary onlinecontent.
With respect to open standards, commercial entities that create significant digital collections (such asGoogle with its digitization of collections from five major U.S. research libraries) should produce at least one version of theresource in a nonproprietary format, if only for deposit with and local use by the institution that holds the originals beingdigitized—and universities should speak with a stronger voice on that point. Funding agencies—including the NSF, NEH, NARA, NDIIPP,and IMLS—and academic leaders should support the development and maintenance of digital tools and increase direct funding for thedevelopment and documentation of standards that improve the preservation and interoperability of digital content in thehumanities and social sciences. Such support should include the development of opportunities for collaboration among tool buildersand between tool builders and standards organizations, as well as scholarly validation of the tools and standards they use. The NEH,NARA, and IMLS should coordinate support for standards activity and should harmonize these efforts with the parallel tool- andresource-building activities of organizations such as the Digital Library Federation.