The American Arts and Letters Network
Project Description
The American Arts and Letters Network (AALN) is conceived as a sophisticated
online directory that both elucidates and allows access to digital information
in the arts and humanities considered integral to all levels teaching,
scholarship, and learning. It will give any campus information network a
ready-made, broad gauge, multi-disciplinary resource in these fields. The AALN
will be constructed as a Homepage on the World Wide Web, using MOSAIC and html
linkages to produce an easily understood and navagatible array of resources and
information.
The AALN project is undertaken by Vassar College with the collaboration of the
American Council of Learned Societies and the Coalition for Networked
Information, and will be housed on a computer server operated and maintained at
the College. The categories of information that will be linked by AALN include
full text databases in the U.S. (examples include ARTFL, The Dante Project, The
Einstein Papers, and databases dedicated to Wittgenstein, Schiller, Chaucer,
Goethe, and C.S. Peirce); information pertaining to the physical centers for
humanities and arts resources, including a directory of key personnel, a
description of the mission and goals of each center, as well as a listing of
its resources; lists and descriptions of image databases (e.g. museums,
schools, and libraries); software used for teaching that can be legally shared
without costs (e.g., the Software Exchange Initiative (SEI); projects ongoing
that utilize information technology in humanities and arts; electronic
journals; locations of full text out of print books; multimedia and hypertext
programs that support humanities and arts; extensive lists of electronic
discussion groups and listserves; alliances, coalitions, scholarly societies,
and organizations that support technology in the arts and humanities; and
selected online conference proceedings.
Purpose of the AALN Project
The AALN is predicated on the understanding that there is currently no
realiable means by which to know of, utilize, or evaluate the tremendous
variety of electronic tools and resources in the humanities and arts. The
absence of a widely accessible locator for these resources inhibits planning,
limits discussion about technology and its implications for the arts and
humanities, and encourages redundancy. A considerable, multifaceted network of
information logically arranged and easily accessible on the WWW would help to
instill nationally: a new realization of what actually exists in the realm of
digital support for the humanities and arts; a more informed understanding of
the potential of these resources for teaching and learning; improvement in
communication among scholars, teachers, and students in the humanities,
history, art history, and other related fields of inquiry; capitalization of
the initiatives of those who early on adopted technology in their teaching and
research, while making available established paradigms for new projects to
build upon.
More generally, the AALN can be extrapolated as an arena for convergence.
Those planning to construct digital libraries can formulate their projects on
the success of existing ones. Standards, by virtue of a very large collection
of existing datasets on this network, will most likely evolve through
widespread communication among the producers of information.
Charles Henry
Director, Vassar College Libraries
chhenry@vassar.edu
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