HyNIC: SIGWEB's Digital Library Project

HyNIC Goals

Outline

HyNIC: Towards a Networked Improvement Community

The name "HyNIC" comes from the idea Doug Engelbart described in his Hypertext'98 keynote address: Networked Improvement Communities (NICs).

As a long-range goal, SIGWEB's HyNIC effort should actively facilitate the growth of SIGWEB into a "Networked Improvement Community" (NIC). Engelbart defines NICs as organizations which (recursively) continuously improve the way they improve their products and services. Continuous metaimprovement occurs recursively at two levels for a professional society, such as SIGWEB:

Members should find new ways to improve both the way they understand the domain and the way they perform their tasks.
The professional society should continuously reevaluate the way it improves its community support.

ACM SIGWEB, as a professional society, is continuously looking for ways to improve service to our members. We view the HyNIC Digital Library effort as a continuously evolving resource for our community.

HyNIC GOALS

To create an advanced, hypermedia-enhanced digital library, and eventually a NIC for the hypermedia and WWW research communities, to be managed under the auspices of ACM SIGWEB.

HyNIC will give access to formal and informal materials in the hypertext community such as publications, technical reports, trip reports, audio tapes, video tapes, photographs, example systems, and teaching materials. It also will contain hypermedia concepts such as annotation, trails and overviews.
HyNIC will serve as a conduit for the diverse research groups in the hypermedia and WWW communities to make their various research systems (compatible and) available (free-of-charge) to all members of the community. We shall also welcome commercial systems to participate, making their systems available free-of-charge for use within the HyNIC project.
The resulting HyNIC will serve as a community-wide testbed for new hypermedia functionality and systems. It will establish a standard environment with which future research should be compliant. It will then provide a broad research base (the entire research community) for testing new research ideas, and for running large scale experiments.
HyNIC will contain new ways to represent the knowledge of the SIGWEB community accessible through the digital library (e.g., through concept maps), so the different stakeholders will easily find the relevant information and processes.
The project will support common processes (tasks) that the community's stakeholders perform. These include teaching, learning, writing a paper compliant with the norms of the research community, publishing, developing compliant software, inserting new materials into the digital library. It also will support the organizational processes of SIGWEB as a professional society, including building a budget, and organizing workshops and conferences.
Effective communication is vital to a virtual, dispersed community. The project will incorporate structured group communication facilities. This will help members working in specific subareas to communicate and collaborate effectively.
HyNIC should be a showcase for other organizations. Through the HyNIC project, we hope to develop guidelines (and maybe even a methodology) for other research communities to organize their collective knowledge and make it available to their communities.

General Digital Library Research Goals

Most digital library efforts to date have concentrated on reengineering library features and procedures for electronic repositories. HyNIC as a research project should greatly extend the scope of digital library support for collaborative knowledge evolution and continuous metaimprovement within virtual communities such as professional societies.

Thus HyNIC can be seen as having the following larger, more general digital library research goals:

Produce the first integration of multimedia repositories, full hypertext support, process support, computer-mediated communication, and conceptual mapping (conceptual knowledge structuring) into an enhanced, duplicable digital library infrastructure for supporting virtual communities.
Study the feasibility, effectiveness and impact of supporting a virtual community with an enhanced digital library infrastructure&emdash;at the individual, group and community level.
It will determine and evaluate approaches and sets of guidelines for a virtual community to develop, engage community participation in, and maintain enhanced digital libraries.
Document how an enhanced digital library infrastructure can support a professional society in educating its members, as well as non-members and students learning about its domain.
Study how an enhanced digital library-based metaimprovement infrastructure can transform a professional society into a Networked Improvement Community (NIC).

HyNIC Web Site: http://www.cis.njit.edu/~bieber/hynic

this document: http://www.cis.njit.edu/~bieber/hynic/hynic-goals.html

last updated: July 8, 1999