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Working Group For The National Portal Initiative

Working Group For The National Portal Initiative

The Working Group is assisting the National Portal team with advice on technical issues that occur and on the development of national standards.  It is composed of leading experts from museums, archives, and libraries with knowledge in collection documentation, metadata issues, and the development of national standards.

The Working Group has a dual role: 1) internally to assist in and advise on the development of the National Portal as the primary source of expertise that can be drawn upon and to provide timely technical reviews of proposals, and 2) externally role to act as liaison with the stakeholder community and other metadata initiatives including METS. Members will serve as a voice of their constituents to raise issues in development of the portal, and to assist in communicating the results of National Portal activities back to the community.

The National Portal will play an important role in moving the community forward on standards by seeking consensus among respected experts active in a wide range of organizations and initiatives. Represented on the Working Group are such institutions as the American Association of Museums, the Society of American Archivists, the Library of Congress, the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) and Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) initiatives, and the Cataloging Cultural Objects Initiative. The Working Group will work with project partners to think through and make recommendations on such issues as:

  • How can the work already done within the archival community and in art museums inform this project?
  • What will the application profile look like?
  • What are the specific needs of the end user, from a search perspective, related to end user production work?
  • What is the best way to get software vendor buy-in, so they are eager to include an interface in their next update?
  • What policies are needed to protect the historical organizations that migrate their data into The National Portal?

The members of the Working Group are:

  • Daniel Gelaw Alemneh, Metadata Specialist & Documentary Librarian, University of North Texas
  • Douglas E. Barnett, Chief of Staff University of Texas Libraries
  • Bob Beatty, Vice President for Programs AASLH
  • Myers Brown, Curator of History & Extension Services Tennessee State Museum
  • Spencer Downing, Academic Researcher, Orlando, FL
  • Max J. Evans, Director of Research and Development, LDS Church
  • Edwin S. Grosvenor, President American Heritage Publishing Co.
  • Nik Honeysett (Representing the American Association of Museums), Head of Administration, J. Paul Getty Museum
  • Sally McCallum, Chief of MARC Office, Library of Congress
  • William E. Moen, PhD Director of Research and Texas Center for Digital Knowledge University of North Texas
  • Angela O’Neal, Director, Information Technology Library of Congress
  • Mark Phillips, Head Digital Projects Unit, Libraries University of North Texas
  • Lisa Spiro, Director of the Digital Media Center, Rice University
  • Herbert Van de Sompel, Team Leader, Digital Library Research & Prototyping, Los Alamos National Laboratory Library (Van de Sompel is a leading expert on metadata harvesting and co-Founder of the Open Access Initiative.)
  • Scott Wands, Heritage Resource Center & Field Services Director, Connecticut Humanities Council.

 

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