Summary Report of Committee Meeting Tuesday April 14, 1998 Georgetown University, Washington, DC

The material from the CETH prototype was, of course, by now quite old and, as an illustration of the necessity in any project for regular, thorough updating, virtually all the links in the material were dead. [...] However, the interoperability of most contemporary databases (using the ODBC standard), the ease of output from one to another and the ease of data input using web-based forms made a database structure favored by the majority of the group. [...] Although there was some voicing of the importance for this information to be usable by a general audience of non-scholars, the majority of the group re-affirmed that this database project should principally serve humanities computing practitioners and funders and that its primary function was to quickly and deeply convey the nature of high-quality, exemplary, current humanities computing projects. [...] Although we would be interested in peer reviews of the projects (and we might encourage Chorus and the Chronicle of Higher Education, for example, to regularly review projects in the database and include the reviews), we are more interested in the technical details of the projects that would indicate the quality of thought and work behind them. [...] Timeline Participants at this meeting will present their prototype records and opening set of criteria before the whole group for discussion and an attempt to iron out agreement on management structure and business plan by the end of September via the list and meetings planned at ACH/Hungary and DRH/Glasgow.