Bamboo: one to watch
I’ve been itching to post about this for quite some time, but it wasn’t general knowledge. Now it is, and I want to call attention to it.
The Bamboo Project (PDF) is—well, I’ll let them explain it:
Bamboo is an multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort to bring together researchers in arts and humanities, computer and information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to collectively tackle the question: How can we enhance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?
It’s a grant project that they’re asking Mellon to fund, and Mellon would be fools and madmen not to. (The folks at Mellon aren’t fools or madmen. Ergo I expect great things. Small disclaimer: MPOW may be touched by this project if it is funded—though I fell in love with it before I knew that.) But even the summary I just linked to is thirty-odd pages of distilled brilliance for anyone who’s interested in research computing, humanities research, digital humanities, or (yes) repository services. You must read it. You simply must. I can’t talk about how brilliant it is without babbling inanely, and everyone else I know who’s read it has been agog at its wonderfulness.
Any study project of this nature faces two major hurdles: have you fully and clearly understood the problem, and have you a workable and practical solution to it? IRs clear the first bar, but fall all over themselves at the second. This proposal soars high over both bars. I couldn’t be more impressed.
This is just my attempt to get a little buzz started around it.