OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
- Develop and maintain open standards and robust tools.
- Create extensive and reusable digital collections.
Finally, the Commission calls for specific investments, not just of money but also of leadership, from scholars and scholarly societies; librarians, archivists, and curators; university provosts and university presses; the commercial sector; government; and private foundations.
The U. S.-based group we know of that is the most active on some of these recommendations is HASTAC (pronounced “haystack”), which stands for the seldom-used Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory.[1] It is a growing consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, social scientists, and engineers from universities and other civic institutions across the United States, and increasingly internationally, who are committed to new forms of collaboration through the creative use of technology. Since 2003 the HASTAC community has been developing tools for multimedia archiving and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative educational programs in information science, virtual museums, and other digital projects. Its stated state aim is “to promote expansive models for thinking, teaching, and research.” During the 2006–2007 academic year HASTAC is organizing impressive public lectures on various campuses. This “InFormation” activity will conclude with the first HASTAC International[2] Conference in April 2007.[3]
There are many other activities, likely already on the Hewlett radar, focused on building high-quality open content for the humanities and popular culture. These include, of course, the Library of Congress American Memory[4] and multilingual Global Gateway[5] projects and more recently the National Archives.[6] The pilot project at the Archives goes well beyond scans of historical documents, including, for example 3-D renderings of historic government ships reconstructed from the official blueprint drawings. Surely many similar activities are under way outside the United States that can be founded and pursued as resources to serve the international, cross-cultural objectives of OER.
- ↑ http://www.hastac.org/
- ↑ Including we understand, some developing countries.
- ↑ http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/1134833.html
- ↑ http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html
- ↑ http://international.loc.gov/intldl/intldlhome.html
- ↑ http://www.archives.gov/era/index.html
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