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    N I N E S

To participate in the NINES aggregation, a scholarly project should be a highly developed technical resource. NINES is not organized to train people in how to create online resources. (However, we do sponsor summer workshops in digital scholarship and share the agendas and course materials for those. Also see below for some basic information on how to initiate and pursue the development of a digital project.)

A developed resource will be web accessible and have structured data (e.g. files coded in XML or to accepted standards such as those of the TEI). The data should be encoded so that required NINES metadata can be extracted from the files. (This RDF metadata is largely based on Dublin Core fields such as author, title, date, and source. It also includes a set of genres relevant to nineteenth-century studies.) In addition, the project should have the integrity expected of any work of scholarship. It need not be "completed" but it should have a clear and finished conceptual design with substantial content in place.

To inquire about participation in NINES please contact inquiries@nines.org.

frequently asked questions

NINES resources can be either free culture/open access projects (i.e., projects whose content is distributed freely on the web under a Creative Commons license, is in the public domain, or falls under fair-use protection) or revenue-generating projects (like those of most journal publishers and university presses). We have produced two documents addressing frequently asked questions about joining the NINES consortium:

guidelines for new projects

The NINES steering committee has produced a set of General Guidelines and Peer Review Criteria for NINES Content.

NINES strongly encourages contributors to encode their texts in XML (rather than HTML) and in accordance with widely-accepted TEI standards for markup of humanities material. That said, TEI markup is not a prerequisite for participation in NINES. Attention to markup standards in the early phases of your project will simply facilitate the production and formatting of necessary metadata for inclusion in NINES.

The MLA's "Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions" is another valuable resource.

Some practical considerations to keep in mind:

  1. Think as carefully as you can about the conceptual design of the project — both logical design and interface design. Crucial questions are: what are the scholarly goals of the project? how does the project design meet those goals and make them evident to users?
  2. Draw up a development plan that maps your project goals to a time schedule, and defines a point at which the project can be considered complete.
  3. Find out what kind of local technical support you can leverage — human resources, hardware, software.
  4. Consider what other resources you will need — e.g., student assistants, technical instruction, financial support, leave time.
  5. In general, plan for a project that will develop incrementally over a number of years and that will involve various kinds of collaboration.