Present: Baumann, Birkhead, Boyer, Carns, Casalini, Celis, Clack, Coulombe (Vice-Chair), Emanuel, Faulkner, Forys, Griego, Hacken, Hager, Henriques, Hierl, Kilton, Kulp, Loh, Male-Wiley, Martin, Miller, Moulaison, Olsen, Remak-Honnef, Rutkowski, Rutter, Siegmund, Skib (Chair), Shipe, Stewart, Stambaugh, Sussman, Wenzel

1. Bryan Skib, current Chair, opened the meeting; announced a change in the agenda, moving item 3 "Introduction to ISiS" to 2.
Introductions were made

2. Introduction to ISiS (Iberian Studies in SALALM)
Griego provided some background on the newly formed group of Iberian Specialists in SALALM and cited several factors that contributed to the formation of ISiS:
" increasing presence and interest in Iberian Studies
" many specialists in Latin American Studies now handle Iberian Studies
" the volume of publications is increasing in Iberian countries
" trend towards the inclusion of Iberian Studies in American Ethnic Studies.

ISiS members have expressed an interest in increasing the sharing of information and communication between ISiS and WESS RLDG. As it was discussed on the WESS RLDG Listserv, WESS welcomes participation and involvement of ISiS members. They are encouraged to join WESS if possible or to contribute to WESS activities in various ways. Loh recapped some of the Listserv discussions regarding ways ISiS members can contribute to WESS:
o Join WESS-ROM
o Submit articles to the WESS newsletter
o Contribute to the web site
o Make announcements on the Listserv
o Write reviews for Reference Reviews Europe
Coulombe announced the creation of an Iberian Studies Web site this summer. Figueroa will share the link with ISiS and WESS RLDG members and will be looking forward to receiving feedback and suggestions.
An announcement of the 51st annual meeting of SALALM was distributed.

3. Main topic: "Cooperative development of digital resources in the Romance Languages." Bryan Skib introduced the topic of the emerging need of collaborative management of digital projects within an institution or with other partners.
The first speaker, Shawn Martin, Outreach Librarian at Text Creation Partnership (TCP) at the University of Michigan (http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/), introduced TCP as an organization which brings the communities of librarians, scholars, and publishers together to support the creation of electronic texts.

TCP is currently working on major projects which involve the academic community and the commercial sector. The three commercial vendors which work in partnership with TCP are Proquest (Early English Books Online, EEBO), Newsbank/Readex (Evans) and Thomson-Gale (Eighteenth Century Collections Online, ECCO). Digital images are created from microfilms by the publishers and full-text search capability is enhanced through SGML/XML encoding by TCP. The full-text capability is funded by academic libraries.
These cooperative projects involve academic institutions that own TCP text rather than just licensing it. Input from scholars is solicited and welcome through selection task forces and other means. Examples of cooperation from academic institutions include Iter (University of Toronto), the Spenser Project (Washington U. - St. Louis), the Metadata Project (University of Victoria) and the Old Bailey Project (Sheffield U). Production sites are located at the National Library of Wales, University of Toronto, Oxford University and the University of Michigan. Each project has its own interface and technical expertise is shared. Keyboarding is done in India and the Philippines.
Coordination is essential with a group review of standards and ongoing communication between partners. Having contact in countries of partnership strengthens the program.
The collaboration with the commercial sector has enhanced the end results: publishers have the ability to disseminate the project information widely and provide a lot of exposure to the projects. In return, publishers get feedback from scholars and academics.
Collaborative partnerships have been mostly for English language resources but the model English-language model can be applied to other languages, as long as a corpus of texts can be defined.

Martin concluded that initiatives like those undertaken by TCP enable us to think broadly and with long term goals about digital projects. We can think creatively beyond the questions of access, looking at the role of content and how scholars make use this of it.

Sebastian Hierl (University of Chicago) and Mark Olsen (ARTFL Project) were the two speakers of the second presentation which focused on Romance languages resources and projects on a smaller scale. These examples could be found in the Latin American Resources Project (LAMP) or the nascent French Resources Collaborative Initiative (FNARP) [renamed Cooperative Initiative for French and North-American Libraries: CIFNAL at the 6/26 meeting] which is listing collaborative digital projects in its summary of goals. Examples of such projects include:
" Institutions interested in the digitized version of a microform set could combine their funds and digitize the microform copy held by an institution
" Building on existing relationships and models, select small non-commercial projects: ARTFL model

Mark Olsen introduced his part by talking about the challenge posed by Google and the relevancy of our work is. Users are looking for added value and he cited the examples of the Alexander Street Press which focuses on quality of the searching and intensive indexing, the Nora Project, a text-mining tool under development at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Women Writers' Project (Brown University) which is experimenting with Philologic developed by ARTFL, and the Maison de Balzac which runs its entire site at the University of Chicago. Functions designed specifically for the use of textual scholars are what make these projects particularly successful.

The discussion centered on the topics of selection of digital projects, cataloging and metadata questions, priority setting and funding.

Announcement: Sebastian Hierl announced that he was taking on the position of German Bibliographer at Harvard and would no longer serve as liaison to ARTFL; Sarah Sussman (Stanford) will take on that role.

The meeting ended with the announcement of the WESS-FNARP Ad Hoc Committee meeting scheduled for Sunday 6/26 2-4 pm and some background about this initiative (Tom Kilton), and a reminder to send articles to Sarah Wenzel, the Newsletter editor for the next issue.