Director's Report

August 2001

With this ECAI Newsletter, we enter into a new era for our association. It is the plan to have new articles and news available for members and the public every six weeks. Kim Carl, our web master and technical associate, will be in charge of seeing that the ECAI Newsletter is made available in this schedule. If any of the members of ECAI have messages or comments for this medium, please contact Kim at ecaiweb@uclink.berkeley.edu.

June 2001 Conference
The Ninth Meeting of ECAI was held in Sydney, Australia last June. I want to take this opportunity to give special thanks to Ian Johnson who helped with the local arrangements but also gave a structure to the meeting that was very successful. The work sessions allowed our technical teams and editors to give time and thought to the processes needed within ECAI over the next months. During the Sydney meeting, Mr. Des Walsh worked with the Strategy Committee as a facilitator. Later, I will report the results of the long range planning for the structure and governance of ECAI.

Schedule for 2001
We are busy with plans for the rest of 2001. Among our many meetings and projects will be:

  • A Gazetteer Team meeting at Academia Sinica this month (August).
  • The International Workshop on Historical GIS is meeting at Fudan University in Shanghai. Ruth Mostern has been the coordinator for this important session dealing with the Harvard-Fudan Project.
  • September will bring a number of ECAI members to the Berkeley campus for the first ECAI Institute. This will be a training session for teams and staff members in the use of GIS, TimeMap, and ECAI Metadata standards. Kevin Mickey from The Polis Center at Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis, is working with Jeanette Zerneke (ECAI Central Technical Adviser) to coordinate this week long seminar.
  • In October, the VSMM Conference dealing with virtual reality and multimedia in cooperation with World Heritage Sites, convenes in Berkeley under the co-sponsorship of ECAI. We expect several hundred
    visitors and will be presenting a number of ECAI projects in the panels. Caverlee Cary is in charge of this and our other conferences.
  • At the end of November, the ECAI Institute moves to The Polis Center in Indianapolis, where archival partners of ECAI will meet for training and planning. This will be hosted by David Bodenhamer and his staff of GIS specialists at The Polis Center.
  • And finally, our activities will end with the Tenth Meeting of ECAI being held in Guadalajara, Mexico. In conjunction with the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium meeting, ECAI members will present reports to the regular members and to the international book fair delegates. The dates of the conference are December 1-4. ECAI will hold additional work sessions on December 5. All ECAI members are invited to attend.

Projects and Initiatives
As you can see, the new ECAI Web site has been greatly improved and I hope you will look to see if the information about you or your project is correct.

There are some important projects and proposals underway in ECAI Central. We expect to launch an African team that will be dealing with linguistics, epidemiological data, and social history. Our K12 program under the leadership of Lin Everetz is working closely with the Interactive University program of the Berkeley campus and the School of Education at Dominican University in San Rafael, California. Publication of ECAI projects that are completed and registered with the metadata clearing house is planned in concert with the California Digital Library. Helping with this is our Publication Coordinator, Mukesh Jain and the eScholarship Director of the California Digital Library, Catherine Candee.

ECAI Central
As part of the policy to strengthen the activities of ECAI Central, we are pleased to have the services of Ms. Valerie Hasan, who has taken over our accounting and budget matters.

Michael Buckland, the Co Director is busy working on review of the ECAI staffing. He also has several large projects that deal with metadata and data management issues. In all cases, he has been able to provide ECAI with valuable assistance from his research and development efforts.

As Director of ECAI, I am serving my second three year term of appointment from the Dean of the International and Area Studies. This fall, I will represent ECAI at several meetings in Europe, among them a conference at the College de France in Paris, the European Digital Library meeting in Dharmstadt, meetings with officials at UNESCO, staff and scholars at the Arts and Humanities Data Service in London, and the British Library. I am writing one section of the volume on Humanities and GIS being planned by ESRI, the producers of ArcView software. The editor, Ann Knowles wants to present ECAI as one of the most active attempts to integrate the GIS approach to the work of Humanities researchers. We will try to keep you appraised of developments through this ECAI Newsletter.


Let me close with a word of thanks to all the many members of ECAI who give so much time and energy to the development of our program. Next year we will be celebrating the our fifth anniversary. We have accomplished a great deal in this early years because of the dedication of individuals who are willing to give leadership in this new era of technology. We all profit from the work these individuals have done and the future looks brighter because of their careful and insightful approaches.