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

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comprehensive record of every s<strong>in</strong>gle change. Users can see this, forever. The discipl<strong>in</strong>e of
transparency and permanence has the virtue of requir<strong>in</strong>g all of us to live up to the high
standards of our field’s motto, and make that motto mean<strong>in</strong>gful: amicitia papyrologorum.
Collegiality is, <strong>in</strong> effect, a technical requirement of SoSOL. It also means that all proposals
must be offered and scrut<strong>in</strong>ized with utmost seriousness, s<strong>in</strong>ce our comments are visible to all,
forever. And, that under SoSOL accurate scholarly attribution is very easy to enforce (Sos<strong>in</strong>
2010).
Despite assurances that proper credit would be given, Bagnall noted that many contributors were
worried about the visibility of their work be<strong>in</strong>g dim<strong>in</strong>ished as their data became “absorbed” <strong>in</strong> a larger
system. To address this issue, Bagnall reported that the Trismegistos project (that provides access to a
number of databases created both <strong>in</strong>ternally and externally such as the HGV) adds a unique item
identifier to the records for an <strong>in</strong>dividual item <strong>in</strong> each database. This allows the federated system to
f<strong>in</strong>d all hits for <strong>in</strong>dividual items while still keep<strong>in</strong>g databases entirely separate; the user has to move
between databases to look at the relevant <strong>in</strong>formation. Bagnall thus expla<strong>in</strong>s how “highly dist<strong>in</strong>ct
brand<strong>in</strong>g is central to their approach.” While Trismegistos has built-<strong>in</strong> l<strong>in</strong>ks to both the DDbDP and
APIS, users must go to the <strong>in</strong>dividual databases from Trismegistos. In addition, no data are exposed for
web services. Nonetheless, conversations are apparently under way to try to more closely <strong>in</strong>tegrate
Trismegistos with the PN, and Bagnall acknowledged that orig<strong>in</strong>ally the HGV ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>ed a similarly
more closed model before decid<strong>in</strong>g to let the new onl<strong>in</strong>e edit<strong>in</strong>g environment operate on their metadata
as well. 506 Thus at the end of IDP, both HGV and DDbDP will issue archival XML data under CC
licenses.
While Bagnall considered concerns about brand<strong>in</strong>g and attribution to be legitimate because of issues of
fund<strong>in</strong>g, credit, and tenure, he thought that the risks of creat<strong>in</strong>g closed collections were more onerous:
But keep<strong>in</strong>g data <strong>in</strong> silos accessible only through one’s own <strong>in</strong>terface has risks too, and <strong>in</strong> my
view they are greater—the risk that search eng<strong>in</strong>es will ignore you and you will therefore reach
a much smaller audience. Our purpose <strong>in</strong> exist<strong>in</strong>g is education; the more we shut out potential
users who will come at the world through Google or similar eng<strong>in</strong>es, the fewer people we will
educate. That to me is an unacceptable cost of preserv<strong>in</strong>g the high relief of the branded silo.
Moreover, these resources will never reach their full value to users without extensive
<strong>in</strong>terl<strong>in</strong>kage, <strong>in</strong>teroperation and openness to remix<strong>in</strong>g by users (Bagnall 2010).
Beyond brand<strong>in</strong>g, the other major concern of most scholars was <strong>in</strong>adequate quality control. Bagnall
conv<strong>in</strong>c<strong>in</strong>gly argued, however, that the editorial structure of Pleiades and IDP <strong>in</strong> some ways offered
stronger quality control measures <strong>in</strong> that <strong>in</strong>correct or <strong>in</strong>appropriate <strong>in</strong>formation could be removed far
more quickly than from a pr<strong>in</strong>ted text, and that the open system allows the community to alert the
editors to mistakes they may have missed. “These systems are not weaker on quality control,” Bagnall
offered, “but stronger, <strong>in</strong>asmuch as they leverage both traditional peer review and newer communitybased
‘crowd-sourc<strong>in</strong>g models’.” New peer-review models such as those developed by this project are
essential <strong>in</strong> any digital <strong>in</strong>frastructure that hopes to ga<strong>in</strong> buy-<strong>in</strong> from a large number of scholars. 507
Another major po<strong>in</strong>t of contention for many scholars Bagnall listed, and one not that easily addressed,
is the issue of personal control. Many scholars are possessive of projects that they have created, and
506 L<strong>in</strong>ks to Trismegistos texts have recently become available through the Papyrological Navigator website.
507 The importance of new peer-review models that make use of the Internet to solicit a broader range of op<strong>in</strong>ions on scholarly material was the subject of
a recent New York Times article (Cohen 2010).