I.  Narrative Description

 

 

A. Significance of the Project

 

The metropolis of Los Angeles, with its extraordinarily diverse population of more than 15 million people, has a history as vibrant and diverse as its multitude of communities and world-class institutions, as tumultuous as its natural environment.  From race relations to international relations, from immigrant cultures to the Hollywood culture industry, the demographic and cultural forces shaping Los Angeles are also those shaping the destiny of the United States and much of the world.  Famously a city without an identifiable center or an evident plan, Los Angeles has been characterized by some of its leading students as “fragmented,” “centrifugal,” “reluctant,” and “provisional”—as the “capital of the Third World” governed by a “history of forgetting” and an “ecology of fear” (Fogelson, 1967; Fulton, 1997; Cuff, 2000; Rieff, 1991; Klein, 1997; Davis, 1998).  In its broadest sense, The Digital Encyclopedia of Los Angeles aims to describe and interpret the complex entity often taken to be the representative twenty-first century city, from its beginnings in 1781 as “El Pueblo de Los Angeles” to its contemporary expression of an urban environment that has been called “postmetropolis.” 

 

Our plan in The Digital Encyclopedia of Los Angeles—“deLA,” signifying “of” or “from” LA, as our acronym means to say of a city whose Latino population is a significant part of its story—is to create and publish on the World Wide Web a work that will allow readers to find comprehensive information about Los Angeles history, culture, politics, demography, architecture, public policy, neighborhoods, ethnic groups, industry, and numerous other topics, while at the same time employing digitized hypermedia to produce densely textured, open-ended accounts and interpretations of the city’s major events and locales.  A signal advantage of the online format is that materials can be simultaneously arranged and viewed hierarchically, chronologically, geographically, and in other ways.  Similarly, the scope and character of the encyclopedia “entries” can be varied to serve different purposes, including diverse kinds of interpretive essays, public policy documents, database materials, maps, timelines, artwork, extracts from historical and scholarly works, and so on.  Contemplation of such a project immediately invites reflection upon the methodology and meaning of an “encyclopedia,” defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a “circle of learning; a general course of instruction.”  To the extent possible, we plan to be true to the Greek origins of the word in enkuklios (“cyclical, periodic”) and paideia (“general education”).  As a “living” encyclopedia, deLA aspires to be a continually evolving work of reference, history, and commentary whose purpose is to educate a broad public, remaining open and tolerant of multiple viewpoints, and striving to identify common denominators that will promote democracy and community among the citizens of Los Angeles.

 

Joined in partnership with many other educational, cultural, and civic institutions throughout the Los Angeles area, the internationally renowned universities UCLA and USC are ideally positioned to form the broadest regional institutional partnerships and to gather together the scholars, information management specialists, archivists, and creative individuals necessary to produce an encyclopedia of the Los Angeles metropolitan area.  We will join the company of New York City and Chicago, each the subject of major encyclopedic projects, by providing to a broad public audience a comprehensive encyclopedia of one of the nation’s three “global cities” (Abu-Lughod, 1999).  In contrast to other major American or world cities, Los Angeles has been the subject of comparatively few overarching historical treatments.  In recent years, however, there has been a renaissance of new writing about the city by historians, sociologists, scholars of urban planning and architecture, cultural critics, and journalists.  Their representations of Los Angeles have been as diverse as the population itself.  From the heroic and positive portrayals of Kevin Starr (1973, 1985, 1990, 1996, 1997) to the apocalyptic and pessimistic accounts of Mike Davis (1990, 1998); from the claims of those who see the emergence of an “LA School” of urban studies (Dear, 2002) to those who deny that any such thing exists (Ethington, 1998); from Latino/a mappings of this indelibly Spanish/Mexican pueblo and megaciudad (Anzaldua 1999; Villa 2000) to a myriad multicultural representations, Los Angeles cannot be contained by any single conceptual paradigm or “master narrative.”  Indeed, Edward Soja’s Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (2000) sees the city as a qualitatively new urban entity whose kaleidoscopic forces transcend the defining categories of modern urban history.  Whatever their theories or methods, however, these writers are generally unified in recognizing that Los Angeles is, in many ways, a harbinger of urban trends in America and the archetypal world city of the twenty-first century.

 

At the same time, scholars, librarians, information technology professionals, and archivists throughout greater Los Angeles have been developing a variety of information resources, though these tools remain as fragmented as the city itself.  The Getty Research Institute, for example, led the development of the L.A. As Subject Directory of Archives www.usc.edu/arc/lasubject, now an online database hosted by USC and supported by a region-wide network of scholars, community archivists, and librarians.  UCLA has developed the Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles database nkla.sppsr.ucla.edu also an online tool, serving communities throughout the city.  USC has created the online Los Angeles Comprehensive Bibliographic Database www.usc.edu/arc/lacbd, comprising 15,000 entries and structured by a robust subject vocabulary.  On a much broader scale, the California Digital Library, a “library without walls” that unites the nine campuses of the University of California system, has begun to create an Online Archive of California www.oac.cdlib.org that provides access to manuscripts, photographs, and works of art held in libraries, museums, archives, and other institutions across California, and features projects such as Counting California (a demographic database) and California Cultures (ethnic group digital archives).   The California Online Encyclopedia, a joint project of the California Studies Program at San Francisco State University and the California Council for the Humanities now in the planning phase, presents us with important collaborative opportunities.

 

One of the first tasks will be to decide how to classify knowledge about the Los Angeles metropolitan region.  We plan to recruit experienced lexicographers and scholars of reference works to help us decide the best system of classification for our needs.  We believe that deLA will offer its users the empowering freedom to organize knowledge of Los Angeles in ways that combine the familiar tools of published reference works with the new ways of discovering and ordering knowledge made possible by the information revolution of the last generation.  As described more fully below in the Plan of Work, we will decide upon the subjects covered by the encyclopedia by building a taxonomic “network” of knowledge derived first of all from eight to ten “Knowledge Domains,” large conceptual categories such as Environment and Politics and Government.  Within each of these rubrics we will identify five to eight Subject Areas, below which will be found shorter essays and entries (a total of approximately 4,000).  Some of these approximately forty to sixty Subjects will be treated through longer “Interpretive Essays” of 8,000 words, each embracing both historical and contemporary dimensions appropriate to the topic.  For example, a leading scholar of the Los Angeles Environment will write a long essay reflecting the best, most comprehensive information and thought about the Subject Area of “Water.”  This essay will be one starting point for identifying the many subtopics, both large and small, pertaining to “Water” throughout Los Angeles history that need to be treated in an encyclopedic reference work and determining how different kinds of multimedia—photographs, film clips, audio files, maps, and other graphics—as well as existing databases of information can be profitably linked to or incorporated into the encyclopedia.

 

Our plan to produce deLA principally through the commission and creation of new work is consistent with the utilization of excellent available resources.  On the one hand, we intend deLA to be in every important particular an original, state-of-the-art reference work.  On the other, the existence of excellent recent encyclopedic works such as Leonard and Dale Pitt’s Los Angeles A-Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County (1997) and David Gebhard and Robert Winter’s Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide (1994), as well as the large number of databases at multiple California institutions on a wide array of topics, offers the opportunity selectively to use existing materials that might otherwise need to be duplicated, without being improved upon, in the encyclopedia.  By exploring ways to license or link to some of the rich reservoir of scholarly, literary, and artistic representations of Los Angeles, we can integrate these resources, in creative ways, so that the seemingly unknowable metropolis can become knowable in empowering ways.  In the first instance, however, deLA will be a work of uncontested reliability and excellence, driven by a coherent and clear editorial vision, to which a broad public can turn for an authoritative understanding of Los Angeles.

 

1. Los Angeles as Subject

 

How does one understand an enormous metropolis such as Los Angeles, a city composed of the peoples of virtually every nation on earth and whose schoolchildren speak more than eighty native languages?  Although it is by no means unique in this respect, the network of ideas and products of which the city is the center is international rather than national, and one is inclined to think of it as much in comparison to Mexico City or Tokyo as in comparison to Chicago or even New York.  By 2000, Los Angeles had become the largest city in the world to lack an ethnic majority.  Hollywood corporations and advertising agencies see to it that “Los Angeles”—more simply, “LA”—as an image or an idea is a place familiar to people in every remote corner of the world.  Los Angeles is one of the nation’s most powerful economic centers.  The economy of the Southern California region, measured by its GDP, would be one of the largest in the world.  Los Angeles is a city of great wealth but also a place whose history of ethnic and class stratification, exacerbated by large waves of legal and illegal immigration, has resulted in serious problems of poverty, crime, and civic unrest.  The “riots” in Watts in 1965 and South Central Los Angeles in 1992 have been taken to be barometers not just of the city’s own racial tensions but symptoms of America’s unresolved struggle to create a society at once pluralistic and inclusive.  With 88 separately incorporated cities ensconced within the county of Los Angeles alone, LA is not just diverse but highly fragmented.  As we write, the whole of the San Fernando Valley is poised to vote on the question of secession from Los Angeles, as is Hollywood (West Hollywood is already separately incorporated).

 

Comparable projects have encountered the fundamental question: What is the/a city? What are its boundaries? Who and what “belongs” to “New York,” to “Cleveland,” to “Chicago”?  (Ethington 2000). The answers to these questions have varied according to the particular needs of each project.  None of them, however, has begun with the fundamental difference inherent in the purely digital work—namely, that insofar as the workspace of the project is itself theoretically without limits, so in key ways, geographic among others, the boundaries of the city become theoretically more expansive.  This defining difference is made all the more prominent in the case of Los Angeles by the fact that its sheer geographic expanse, its lack of a defining urban core, its mythological overlay as a continually recreated Hollywood production, and its decidedly multicultural, global character—all of these things conspire to make the city in its very nature a fluid, amorphous urban space. 

 

The geographic scope of deLA will be defined by two basic scales, which could be summarized as “Los Angeles Proper” and “Greater Los Angeles.”  Our primary focus will be delimited by the County of Los Angeles (and the City of Los Angeles within it). To the extent that the project intends to be an exhaustive reference work, it will generally be confined to Los Angeles County.  This parameter alone is very generous.  With a population of nearly ten million in the 2000 Census, Los Angeles County, the most populous in the United States, would be the sixth largest state.   Where appropriate—in its treatment of Los Angeles’ entertainment and defense industries, for example, or of its delicate, diverse ecology, persistently disrupted by a history of relentless development—deLA will also encompass the history and geography of the greater Los Angeles basin, defined as the five-county metropolitan region (Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties), whose population exceeds 15 million.  In fruitful and unavoidable ways, any geo-historical study of Los Angeles is of necessity a study of Southern California, and in some cases it will be important to range farther than the five counties.  The story of water in Los Angeles begins outside of the state, for instance, while the stories of Latino or Asian immigration begin in countries beyond the borders of both state and nation.  These larger global networks are typical of all great cities, however, and we see no difficulty in maintaining focus on Los Angeles while providing coverage of global issues.  This larger definition of “LA” is both generous enough to leave the editors with flexibility and coherent enough to deserve respect for deLA’s intellectual integrity.

 

2.  Audience

 

There currently is no single, trustworthy and reliable source of comprehensive knowledge about Los Angeles available on the Internet.   Such a source would be welcomed by everyone from schoolchildren to advanced researchers.  One goal of any city encyclopedia must be to perform the civic function of helping the city’s people to know their environment better, to see beyond their neighborhoods, and to appreciate the city’s diverse history, culture, and political life.  In this respect, the Digital Encyclopedia of Los Angeles is conceived of as both a scholarly project and one designed to invigorate civic interest in the many social and ecological forces that have shaped the region and the city, as well as the public and private policy decisions that led Los Angeles to the forefront of the world’s “global” cities.

 

In this respect, the advantages of an encyclopedia published online are considerable.  The work will be free to anyone with Internet access, a number of people worldwide that grows exponentially each year.  If, for example, the Encyclopedia of Chicago History is expected to sell something on the order of 30,000 copies in the initial years of its initial edition, one can be sure that the number of people having access to those books, most obviously in schools and libraries, is a significant multiple of that figure.  But however great the number it is dwarfed by the number of people worldwide who will be able to use the work when its online version is completed. (Internet access was estimated at over 0.5 billion households worldwide in February 2002, up from about 16 million in 1995). [1] Closer to home, unique visits to the USC Archival Research Center’s website (the unit that will be publishing deLA) is in Spring 2002 nearly 10,000 per month (or over 300 per day).  We conservatively can expect deLA user volume to be at least this great several years from now, when it is first released.

 

The ability to tell the story of Los Angeles not only through text and still images, but through sound and motion as well, requires that we build the work with different access capabilities in mind, bearing in mind the number of users likely to have broadband access by our projected initial publication date in 2007.

 

The intended audience for deLA is as broad as possible, but we target especially the following likely users: schoolchildren from grades four through twelve studying their broader community (the city’s history and culture appears as a formal part of the public school curriculum in grade four); college and university students who need more authoritative and reliable research sources online; advanced scholars seeking the broad contextualized knowledge, as well as the fine-grained information, not featured in specialized monographs and essay collections; and the lay public, who depend on such reference works to provide usable knowledge about the worlds they make and live in.  It will be a primary responsibility of the editors to ensure that the project’s structure and features adequately meet these needs.  Each substantial entry will include a short overview written in everyday language and will present a table of contents to deeper, more interpretive, and perhaps more specialized representations of the same subject, by means of related entries, multimedia materials, or links to selected websites.  (See Sample Entry in Appendix C). Readers will then have the option of following the subject matter as far as their interests or reading and conceptual skills allow them.  As described further below, we will work with faculty at the schools of education at UCLA and USC and consult with Los Angeles teachers to ensure that the needs of primary and secondary students are included at all points.

 

We are particularly committed to investigating all feasible possibilities for electronically publishing deLA in languages other than English.  The first priority in this regard will be to investigate the possibility of translating Entries into Spanish, the native language for nearly one-half of the Los Angeles population.  The current proposal does not include a budget for this translation because the planning implications are too complex to be addressed prior to the establishment of the Editorial Board.  A completely bilingual encyclopedia would be ideal, but it would also impose very great challenges regarding the controlled subject vocabulary used in the cataloging of the Entries.

 

3.  The Digital Encyclopedia

 

The deLA will be a free, open-access online resource, which means it will be “electronically published,” accessible free of charge to anyone in the world, via the Internet as a “website.”  That “website” will exist primarily on a single, high-volume “server” (industrial-strength computer) located physically at USC, and managed, maintained, and backed-up by the Information Services Division (ISD) of USC.  There are no plans in this proposal for either print versions or for CD-ROM/DVD distribution. Credit for the creation and authorship of deLA, as well as its sponsorship, will be made clear on its home page and other introductory pages (our demonstration deLA project website may be found at http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/LAS/history/historylab/deLA/index.html)

 

The so-called “Digital Revolution” has already matured to a point that we can draw on solid experience and avoid rushing into over-enthusiastic experiments.  Thanks to a strong foundation laid by universities, the U.S. Government (especially the Library of Congress), and by major for-profit corporations, it is now beyond question that high-quality, durable, and standards-based educational and scholarly products may be designed and implemented for access via the Internet (using “web browsers”).  It is also clear that, while expensive to develop, such online publications can be provided free of charge to the broadest imaginable public, reaching across socioeconomic and ethnic divides.  Although the private ownership of a home computer has not become as universal as that of television (although every indication is that it soon will be), computers with Internet access are almost universally available now in public schools and public libraries.  Access to the “information highway” is no longer the most important issue.  Far more important is the quality and reliability of the information that is accessed.  Far too often the “best” (most effective) method of carrying out research the Internet is to enter a key word into “Google” ™, “Yahoo”™, “Alta Vista” ™, or similar “search-engines,” which return to the user an impressive array of “hits” (links to relevant websites) within seconds.  In a very loose and inappropriate sense, the entire Internet has become one single indiscriminate “encyclopedia.”  We believe that the leading non-profit research and educational institutions of the region have a responsibility to provide leadership in the creation of trustworthy resources on the Internet.  The deLA project is dedicated to the notion that electronic access is a vital gateway of democratic interchange but that without intellectual accountability the trustworthiness, and hence the intellectual value, of such access cannot be guaranteed.

 

We propose to create a work that retains all of the techniques and strengths of traditional scholarship—including print encyclopedias—while taking fullest advantage of the distinct capabilities of digital media for the organization and presentation of knowledge.  We also plan to press the electronic medium into the service of fully-documented scholarship, rather than vice-versa.  deLA will be a genuinely multi- and hyper-mediated publication, combining verbal text, linked databases, still images, audio-visual files, interactive maps, and possibly even a variety of “virtual reality” media (such as 3-dimensional architectural models, wrap-around panoramas—depending upon planning assessments).  It is important to stress, however, that each element of deLA will be fully authenticated as to source, authorship, and accuracy. 

 

How we intend to achieve such high intellectual standards within the notoriously unregulated digital media requires careful explanation.  Through extensive consultation with area specialists in both urban studies and information technology, we have conceptualized deLA as a semi-porous publication: a mostly self-contained reference work, with a carefully-regulated set of “links” to carefully certified databases and resources outside of the direct control of the editors.  Imagine a continuum, with “self-contained” (Point A) at one end and “gateway” (Point Z) at the other.  A self-contained digital encyclopedia would provide the user only with materials contained within that website.  Other resources might be referenced (e.g., in a bibliography or by means of unactivated links), but the user would be required to exit that website in order to search and access those other resources.  At the other end of the spectrum, a “gateway” website would consist entirely of activated links to existing on-line databases and websites; it would contain no materials that were unique to the “encyclopedia” itself.  In this extreme case, the user would have no choice but to exit the website during each use, and would need to find her or his way back to the encyclopedia from wherever those links led. The value of Point A on this continuum is that all the materials in the encyclopedia can be fully subjected to quality control by the Editors.  The value to Point Z on the spectrum is that highly-valuable databases developed by other institutions can be brought to the service of the user.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A                             deLA                                                                    Z      |----------------------+--------------|---------------------------------|   Point A: Hypothetical online encyclopedia as a self-contained website deLA is planned to be mostly self-contained, with strong use of a limited and highly-regulated set of outside databases and websites (called “supplements”), each of which has a negotiated relationship with deLA. Point Z: Hypothetical online encyclopedia as a “Gateway” to other databases and websites.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the diagram above indicates, we intend to err on the side of editorial control by planning a website that is mostly self-contained.  The opportunities for linkages outside

of the deLA website are endless, so we intend to establish those links by strict criteria of quality, durability, and standards of reliability that are consistent with the very high standards we are setting for the content of deLA itself.   Our encyclopedia will be primarily a work of secondary scholarship, not a digital archive of primary materials, and when deLA directs users beyond the encyclopedia to pursue other networks of knowledge, we intend that they will approach these other resources with a better awareness of the high standards possible in online reference works.

 

Indeed, our model for building deLA is to “commission” or license every element specifically for the encyclopedia.  Our interpretation of the term “commission” includes a) traditional textual entries originally written for deLA under contract with its Editors; b) multimedia “entries” specifically created for the deLA under contract with its Editors; c) incorporation of existing printed or digital reference works in whole or in part into deLA, adapted to suit the standards of the Editors, under contracts or license agreements as each case may require; and d) inclusion of external databases as “supplements” which appear where appropriate throughout the deLA entries, in a manner jointly acceptable to the owners of those databases and the deLA Editors.  By “licensing” we refer to the process whereby we will obtain the full contractual right to publish electronically images or excerpts from copyrighted texts.  We plan, most obviously, to make extensive use of still photographic images from the millions of images held by the Huntington Library, UCLA, USC, and other area archives.  Each of these images will be used under specific license, and we have been assured to date that license fees will be waived for the vast majority of these at least 4 million images.  We also plan to negotiate license agreements with publishers of books or periodicals, both historic and more recent, containing valuable passages on various topics covered by the encyclopedia.

 

Much work remains to be done by the deLA project staff and advisors to specify the specific functions of the deLA website.  As the Plan of Work in this proposal indicates, we plan to spend much of  Year 1 refining the actual operationality of the desired “functional specifications” for the published website, with the Editing and Publishing teams working closely together, to negotiate an optimal solution for their respective parameters.

 

The Digital Encyclopedia of Los Angeles (deLA) is planned to take full advantage of relational database and interactive Web technologies, in order to provide users with far more powerful modes of “reading” than are possible in traditional print encyclopedias.  The six planned modes of searching are determined to be fully feasible given available skills and technology.

 

Modes of Searching:  (1) Traditional alphabetic browsing; (2) Browsing via Subject Categories; (3) Keyword searching; (4) Full text searching; (5) Spatial/Locational searching; (6) Chronological searching.

 

(Please see Appendix G for a detailed description)

 

B.  History of Project

 

This project builds on significant groundwork laid by institutional and individual scholarly projects at both UCLA and USC during the past several years.  Both universities have laid priority on cultivating research resources for the Southern California region.  Beginning in 1995, Dr. Philip Ethington led a group of USC faculty, librarians, and computer programmers to create a regional digital archive called ISLA: Information System for Los Angeles.  This system was planned to allow researchers to search a database of primary research materials in all formats (quantitative, textual, spatial, audio-visual, and photographic) using a space-time-keyword-format search system.  This project spawned a wide array of digital archiving projects at USC, stimulating the Information Services Division to establish a sold basis in this area.  By 1998, when the first prototype of ISLA was released, USC had created a fully-staffed Digital Imaging and Archiving center, and by 2000, had united its digital research projects under a new unit, the Archival Research Center (ARC). (http://www.usc.edu/isd/archives/arc/) The ARC website at USC now electronically publishes several major archival collections, along with the Los Angeles Comprehensive Bibliographic Database (LACBD), a project which Ethington initiated in 1999.  ARC also united the librarian and information technology professionals needed to plan and execute complex digital library projects.  Its current priority is to implement the Collection Information System (CIS), using a Content Management System (CMS), to integrate all of its digital archives and also to facilitate the deLA project.  Implementation of this system begins in FY 2003.  The ISLA spatial searching interface is now in its third stage of development, called the “Geobrowser,” with a fully-functional prototype to be tested in Summer 2002.

 

Beginning in 1995, Karen L. Stokes of the The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities began to convene a region-wide “LA as Subject Archives and Collections Advisory Forum,” to establish a network of all the region’s archives, large and small.  This forum has met quarterly ever since, and its collective effort produced a print and online directory of archives in 1999, published by the Getty Research Institute.  In 2000 USC’s Archival Research Center (ARC) assumed the institutional support for the LA as Subject Advisory Forum and transferred the online Directory of Archives to its website (The Getty only wished to initiate the project).  This online database is now being expanded to allow researchers not only to inspect the collection descriptions, but eventually to search the digital archives of the 185 participating institutions.  This LA as Subject Directory of Archives is now planned to be a major “Supplemental Database” for deLA.

 

Meanwhile, beginning in 1999, Professor Michael Dear, Director of USC’s  Southern California Studies Center (SC2), along with Professors Greg Hise of USC and William Deverell of California Institute of Technology (CalTech), began to plan an “Encyclopedia of Southern California.”  Early preparations included a meeting in Los Angeles with several of the editors of already-published encyclopedias.  Present were David Bodenhamer (Encyclopedia of Indianapolis), Burt Feintuch (Encyclopedia of New England) and Peter Eisenstadt (Encyclopedia of New York). Also present were representatives of the University of California Press.  Dear, Deverell, and Hise wrote a detailed proposal and did extensive research into questions of funding, organization, staffing, and scheduling.  This proposal was primarily print-based, however, and by 2001 the project was on hold due to lack of enthusiastic publishers.  Professors Dear, Deverell, and Hise have now enthusiastically transferred their project groundwork to the deLA effort, and have fully joined the deLA planning team. (See letters of support in Appendix F.)

 

In Spring 2001, after conversations with then NEH-director William Ferris, faculty and administrators at UCLA began to explore campus-wide interest in the development of a digital encyclopedia of Los Angeles.  The interest turned out to be significant on all levels—faculty, staff, administrators—and in the areas of research, education, technology and community outreach.  It became immediately apparent that there was vast potential to capitalize on the flood of new scholarship on Los Angeles, to create new research opportunities for graduate students, and to conduct research in new uses of technology.  Equally important was the recognition of an opportunity to collaborate with many institutions in the Los Angeles area on a project of mutual benefit and of benefit to the community.  In Fall 2001 a steering committee was established at UCLA to begin to develop the parameters for the project.  A larger team of faculty and technology experts was convened to work with the steering committee.  During this time information was collected on other encyclopedias, on likely participants—both individuals and institutions, and on existing archival and other resources.  Then in January 2002, Eric Sundquist stepped forward and agreed to lead the project.  Once this occurred, Dr. Sundquist began contacting other institutions in the LA area to seek collaborators.  His inquiries rapidly led him to colleagues at USC, including Dr. Ethington.

 

Once Professors Sundquist and Ethington began to compare notes, it became apparent that the groundwork laid at both institutions prepared the way for a truly extraordinary opportunity, a joint UCLA-USC project.  Intensive consultations ensued between faculty, administrators, and staff and by May of 2002 the relevant Deans at both UCLA and USC met to give this unusual collaboration their full support, with Ethington and Sundquist recognized as General Editors.  At this point, Ethington and Sundquist began a series of conversations with an extensive network of individuals and institutions throughout greater Los Angeles, essentially building on their already-established networks and relationships.   The General Editors will continue those conversations in coming months in order to draw into collaboration an even larger group, but we feel strongly that we already have in place a network of impressive individual talent and institutional commitments.  The respective leaders of UCLA and USC in particular have made deLA an initiative of high priority for their institutions, recognizing both its importance to the people of Los Angeles and the groundbreaking collaboration between two of the city’s major universities. 

 

C.  Methodology and Standards

 

1.   Overall Production Strategy

 

The digital nature of deLA will make it possible (a) to produce the encyclopedia in “phases,” publishing the first “release” (edition) more rapidly than has been the case with new print encyclopedias; and (b) to build the encyclopedia in an institutionally “distributed” fashion, integrating the contributions of many individuals and projects simultaneously.

 

a. Phased Production, with More Rapid Publication.

 

The two most impressive metropolitan encyclopedias to date, The Encyclopedia of New York City (ed. Kenneth Jackson) and The Encyclopedia of Chicago History (ed. James Grossman, Ann Keating, and Janice Reiff), each took about ten years from project conception until the public was able to access the work.  Although this project length seems perfectly appropriate for works of such scale written from scratch by hundreds of scholars, we plan to shorten the time before initial release through the strategy of building on valuable work already completed and by putting online portions of the encyclopedia as they become completed.  As noted above, we anticipate being able to license some portions of existing works of encyclopedic scope and respected authority at the same time we are composing new entries, so that within four years from a July 2003 project start (June 2007) the broad public may search deLA online and profit greatly, even though the project will continue adding original material created specifically for this encyclopedia.  We also plan to approach a broad range of authors and publishers with a proposal to incorporate excerpts of their works (typically, a polished and potent passage about a particular event, such as the round-up and incarceration of Japanese Issei and Nisei in 1942, or the first impressions of Spanish explorers in 1542).  Because we do not plan any printed version of this encyclopedia, and because we plan to keep these excerpts short, we believe that some authors and publishers will view this proposal as an opportunity to broaden the publicity for their printed works.  In a few cases, these excerpts may represent appropriate “entries” on a give topic, although in most cases they will be a means to supplement our coverage of a topic with richer historical contextualization and important “point-counterpoint” perspectives.

 

Our intention is decidedly not simply to knit together vast quantities of information indiscriminately.  Rather, our intention is to supplement commissioned original work and to employ this strategy to move more quickly forward with some key tasks.    The overriding principle at every stage will be the scholarly integrity of the materials included, an integrity guaranteed by the thorough and continuing review of the General Editors and our Editorial Board, whose first responsibility will be to insure that in building the encyclopedia we have comprehensive coverage of all appropriate topics.

 

Necessarily unresolved at this point is the appropriate method of “incorporating” valuable digital resources without diminishing the integrity and independence of the projects that produced them.  We believe that a combination of licensing and software solutions to this question are well within reach, but we also want to establish a strong precedent for guaranteeing the intellectual property rights of diverse contributors.  For this reason, we plan to use the first six months of the funded project time to develop acceptable procedures for the “incorporation” of these materials in ways that leave the projects as the valuable stand-alone resources they are today.

 

The key existing reference resources we are considering at this time for “incorporation” are:

 

 1) Printed reference works, from which a substantial number of Entries could be “commissioned” (revised or repurposed for the deLA project, pending license and use agreements with the authors and publishers.  Primary targets for this kind of “incorporation” include Leonard and Dale Pitt’s Los Angeles A-Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) and David Gebhard and Robert Winter’s Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1994).  In both of these cases the authors, not the publishers, hold the copyright.

 

2) Supplemental databases, are existing, stand-alone databases with whose owners/project leaders we intend to form close operational ties.  These we envision as structured links or access-points within deLA Entries, so that users will be prompted that material relating to their deLA search can be found in those allied databases.  The principal targets for this kind of “incorporation” include: Los Angeles Comprehensive Bibliographic Database (Electronically published by USC, 15,000 entries) and the LA as Subject Directory of Archives (cross-referenced and detailed descriptions of 185 Los Angeles-area archives, also electronically published at USC); the Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles; and the Online Archive of California created by the California Digital Library. 

 

3) Excerpted books and articles.  This category of “ready-made” material is the least developed from a planning perspective, but we do anticipate the ability to negotiate license agreements with authors and publishers who have in their books and articles excellent and appropriate passages treating specific subjects covered by desired Entries in deLA.  Further planning will be required to determine the best use of such material.  The Editors will need to determine whether entire Entries can be composed in this way, or whether excerpts are more appropriate for “point – counterpoint” sidebars, supplemental reading, and so on.

 

The extensive use of newly commissioned interpretive essays of varying lengths, along with deployment of already published textual materials and existing databases, will result in an integrative approach to the encyclopedia’s creation.

 

b. Building in a “distributed” fashion.

 

During the first year of the project, we plan to customize for the deLA project USC’s “Collection Management System,” licensed from a third-party vendor, which is capable of allowing the seamless input of encyclopedia content from multiple locations (i.e., “distributed”) across Los Angeles.  Principally, this means that project personnel at both UCLA and USC, as well as authors at yet other sites, will be able to add, review, edit, and revise entries under a rational and efficient system guided by strict editorial control.  Printed works meeting our editorial standards that we successfully license for  “incorporation” will be converted to digital form (i.e., “scanned” by optical character recognition), marked-up with appropriate subject term metadata, and “loaded” into the encyclopedia database.  USC is identifying the optimal Collection Management System (CMS) to accomplish these tasks (the vendor review process is currently underway), but once in place, we will be able to assign production responsibilities across both universities, depending upon the optimal mix of personnel resources.

 

2.  Preparation and processing of material:

 

To implement the overall production strategy outlined above, we plan to coordinate all workflow through a coherent administrative and technological system.  The following are the critical elements of deLA’s information architecture: (1) Content Management; (2) Data Repository, with online and nearline storage systems;  (3) Standard data structure (4) Thesaurus Management; (5) Digital Asset Management (6) Search Engine; (7) Web Interface.  All these elements are intertwined, so we shall address them all in this and the following sections.

 

USC’s Information Services Division has committed to and is actively developing a system – the Collection Information System (CIS) – that will provide this functionality.  The system is being built to initially ingest, manage, and deliver USC’s growing Digital Archive.  However, it is being built using robust (for maximum performance and reliability), scalable, interoperable, standard components so that its use can be expanded to deliver a wide range of scholarly and educational information via the Web including the online encyclopedia of Los Angeles.  Some of the components are available already (Data repository with a standard data structure) while others are in active development (the RFI process has been completed for Content Management System (CMS) application with the RFP process scheduled to be completed by the Fall of 2002) while still others are scheduled for completion later in 2003 and 2004 using funds that USC leadership has committed to in both staffing and capital dollars though 2005.  (Commitment to sustain or upgrade/replace these systems is effectively permanent).  USC will serve as an effective “Publisher” of the encyclopedia because it is already building the information architecture needed and its component parts will be completed prior to the encyclopedia’s needs.

 

At the heart of the project will lay the Content Management System (CMS).  This CMS will enable distributed submission, copyediting, revision, and publication of deLA entries to the Web, as well as tracking and management of the content within associated databases.  It will enable multiple approval workflows, so that editors and research staff can pass each entry along to the appropriate next procedure or reviewer, within the broad subject categories under separate editorial supervision (e.g. Architecture versus Ecology).  The CMS allows for version control and rollbacks to previous versions.  It will interface with the encyclopedia content, with the metadata describing the content as well as with a thesaurus management application that will help contributors and/or editors to control the terminology used to describe the content and later, to provide a variety of access points through a user interface. If the Editors decide to adopt specialized thesauri for different subject matter areas, the CMS will enable us to assign those thesauri to distinct sets of entry types.   Just as importantly, the CMS will dynamically interface with the deLA website itself.  Entries can be coded to be displayed with different web page templates (such as navigation pages, entry pages, specialized pages for chronologies, locations, and biographies, and so on).  The entries, when an editor decides it is ready, can then choose to publish it to the Web from the CMS.

 

3. Organization of and access to material

 

a.  Overview

 

At present, we conceive of the elements of the deLA as falling into four categories: (1) Metadata (cataloging information, especially controlled subject vocabulary and locational information); (2) Entries (articles ranging in length from major 8,000-word “Interpretive Essays” to 100-200 short Entries; (3) Multimedia (image files, audio files, movie clips, and maps used in concert with any Entry); and (4) Supplemental Databases (any searchable database external to the deLA’s databases, made available to users through links within Entries).  Types 1 through 3 will all be contained within deLA’s internal databases, fully controlled and maintained by the project.  Type 4, Supplemental Databases will be maintained and controlled by external projects or institutions, but selected very carefully on the basis of standards of durability and authentication developed by the Editors.

 

DeLA will leverage USC’s Collection Information System (CIS) that is currently in development with commitment from USC.  It is built on standards on all levels:  Oracle on UNIX for the platform and environment; XML schema to hold Dublin Core qualified data structure.  It will be Z39.50 compliant as well as OAI compliant.  The scalability and flexibility of XML within Oracle will enable the incorporation of full text encyclopedia entries for developing flexible access options.  Additionally, these standards provide for the relating of entries, multimedia, reference links, and controlled vocabulary terms to metadata while enforcing the integrity of those relations.  Hierarchical relationships among the entries will also be indicated and retained for flexibility of searching and displaying options.  To ensure the reliability and currency of the links to external databases from within deLA, a management solution will be explored and developed utilizing the standards developing around Persistent URLs (PURL) and Digital Object Identifiers (DOI).

 

In addition to providing the information architecture, the USC CIS is being built on widely accepted standards.  The data repository of metadata records describing every encyclopedia entry and associated digital resource will use the market leader Oracle as its database while the data is contained in an XML schema based on Qualified Dublin Core (DC).  The schema provides for the tagging of over 40 elements for each entry and resource as well as their relationships so that data can be navigated hierarchically.  The XML DC standard also provides for the linkage between a metadata record and its digital objects.  We are confident these standards provide the right balance between effective access for users while providing for a simple and efficient editorial process.  For applications that will use the data contained in the repository (Content Management, Thesaurus Management, Search Engine, etc.), we are buying open, scalable, non-proprietary systems that will meet the needs of the deLA encyclopedia while simplifying future content migrations.  For all multimedia digital objects associated with the encyclopedia and stored within the CIS, we will utilize California Digital Library (CDL) standards at a minimum.  For materials for which CDL standards are not yet available or are not granular enough (for example, large-scale still images vs. small prints), we will supplement CDL standards with others available including those researched, developed, and documented by the USC Digital Imaging Lab.  We will review and make use of developing standards in related industries as needed, not restricting ourselves to the Library field.  Web-quality derivatives will be generated automatically on-the-fly based on the needs of the encyclopedia and developing broadband trends.  Web derivative sizes and quality will be regularly reviewed and adjusted as broadband trends and technology change.

 

b. Development of deLA’s  Subject Term Thesaurus

 

The Editors and project staff will first refine a uniform, hierarchically-structured Subject Term Thesaurus (the “controlled vocabulary”). This resource is conceived as a “topic tree.”  Nested within “parent” terms like “Motion Pictures” will be “child” terms like “Actors,” “Directors,” and “Screenwriters.”  Careful construction of this deLA Subject Term Thesaurus is of utmost importance to the project, because each Entry submission will need to be marked-up with the appropriate terms, and because the overall rationality of this thesaurus will ensure effective user browsing capability and high precision and recall rates for user searches.  Browsing is defined here as ways to click through pre-selected deLA options.  Searching is defined here as the interactive capability that enables users to define their information need and the system to deliver information that meets their criteria.  In short, the same Subject Term Thesaurus is vital to both the creation and use of the Digital Encyclopedia of Los Angeles.

 

Of course, we plan to conform to all relevant standards for controlled vocabularies.  But our goal is also to construct a controlled vocabulary that ensures maximum effectiveness for Entry creation and user browsing and searching, within a reference work necessarily customized for a single, unique region.  By necessity, there can be no single, uniform standard for city- or region-level control vocabularies, because each metropolitan region has a unique set of place names (toponymy), proper names, economic sectors, and so on (the movie industry in Los Angeles, for instance).  Many aspects of Los Angeles may conform very well to standardized controlled vocabularies, however (such as AAT: Art and Architecture Thesaurus, and ULAN: Union List of Artist Names).  Indeed, the general subject terms in the hierarchy may well be modeled on those of established urban reference works, such as the  Encyclopedia of Chicago History.  Through its Los Angeles Comprehensive Bibliographic Database project (LACBD), USC has already created a Thesaurus of Place Names and Thesaurus of Proper Names for Los Angeles (http://www.usc.edu/isd/archives/arc/lacbd/index.html).  In many cases, and wherever possible, Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) may suffice.  It remains now to determine the optimum combination of standards and unique elements for the deLA project.

 

We plan to begin implementing the “Los Angeles Subject Term Thesaurus” during Year 2 of the project.  The process of refining and continuously updating this resource will proceed via focused collaborations between the Editors, librarians, and a lexicographer hired for specifically for this project.  Senior Editors responsible for each major subject area will generate lists of required characteristics for the thesaurus within their area of interest (Architecture, Motion Pictures, Politics, etc), while librarians work directly with those editors to identify and evaluate existing standardized control vocabularies.  Further, it is clear that the creation of the “Los Angeles Subject Term Thesaurus” will entail an ongoing update and maintenance cost throughout the life of the deLA project.

 

The thesaurus management application will enable the deLA encyclopedia to utilize multiple existing thesauri such as the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) and others.  However, recognizing that the appropriate granularity of subject term coverage needed for the encyclopedia may not be achievable through existing thesauri, during the initial phase of the project, the editorial board will research and identify the thesauri to be applied to the encyclopedia and determine if we will customize them to fit the needs of the encyclopedia or if we will build and maintain an encyclopedia group of thesauri – subject, geographic names, and personal names.  Either scenario will be supported with the CIS’s Thesaurus Management application.

 

c.  Link Management and TEI Encoding for Full Text Retrieval

 

Finally, the encyclopedia has two additional functional needs not provided by the CIS: effective management of the links within encyclopedia entries to external resources to minimize broken links within the encyclopedia; and support for text encoding (TEI) for effective full text precision and recall retrieval rates that will also help ensure persistence of the data over time.  The appropriate TEI schema will be researched and selected during the first phase of the project as will the most effective tools and systems in the management of PURLS such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOI).

 

d.  Access to Material: Web Search Interface Development

 

The Editors and project staff will design the specific functional specifications for the Web Search Interface as well as the graphic design of the Web Search Interface during Years 1 and 2 of the project (See Timeline, Appendix H).  These functional capabilities will be built into the Content Management System during Years 2 and 3.  We will only begin the Web Design process once the full content and functionality are finalized and clear.  At that point, we will begin two year-long design processes, using, under the supervision of Victoria Vesna, Chair of the Design | Media Arts Department at UCLA. Student course work will be devoted to designing the search and navigational interfaces, as well as the Web templates for the CMS to produce these pages on the fly.  By the end of the three-year NEH grant, we will have both the content and the system in place to begin publication during Year 4.  A consultant Web Developer will also be hired to design the Web templates while a Programmer/Integrator will be hired to implement the functional specifications beyond those available in the search interface application.  It is important to recognize that we will use off-the-shelf, existing technology whenever possible, and that the Web Search Interface can be revised in the future: its features and individual page types will be generated “on the fly” by the Content Management System from Web templates.

 

e.  LA Gazetteer and GeoSpatial Browser for Geocoding and Spatial Searching

 

We have a very specific plan, based on years of development in the ISLA (Hunt and Ethington 1996, 1997) and related projects at USC, to “geocode” Entries for the purpose of spatial searching of the deLA encyclopedia.  This aspect of the project will be directed by John P. Wilson, Director of the USC GIS Laboratory, and Geography Editor for the deLA project.  The precise manner in which spatial searching will take place within the deLA Web Search Interface will need to be planned carefully during Years 1 and 2 of the project, per the Plan of Work.  Underlying any technical system for searching and retrieving Entries or other encyclopedia contents based on geographic locational information, is a standards-based plan for cataloging each Entry or place reference in a standard way according to a gazetteer (directory of place names).  Our first priority will be to establish a systematic and respected gazetteer to be used in cataloging the deLA elements. USC has already begun creating an “LA Gazetteer” for the purpose of geocoding its digital archives for spatial searching.  Any such gazetteer will be fully reviewed and approved by the Editorial Board and the project staff lexicographer, of course.  Here we briefly describe this LA Gazetteer, and then the GeoSpatial Browser, which is planned for use in deLA spatial searching.

 

(Please see also Appendix J: “Building a Neighborhood-Specific Gazetteer for a Digital Archive”)

 

 

LA Gazetteer

 

Given the great complexity of any metropolitan region as regards toponymy (place names, such as “Boyle Heights,” or “Baldwin Hills”), and yet the unavoidable necessity of using a standard toponymic vocabulary for the writing and geocoding of deLA encyclopedia Entries, work now underway includes the development of a gazetteer service and gazetteer database for the Los Angeles Region. This gazetteer service and the accompanying database will provide a bridge between the vernacular place names and other terms that we use to talk about this region and other parts of the world and the formal spatial referencing systems that are used by computers. This linkage will serve two purposes for the encyclopedia project (as it does for the USC Los Angeles Digital Archive): (1) it will allow archivists and other data providers to specify geographic names instead of geospatial coordinates for the geographic footprints that are saved as a part of the metadata records; and (2) it will allow encyclopedia patrons to start with a geographic name and find encyclopedia entries that are described with either geographic names or geospatial coordinates. The first will reduce the time, effort, and cost incurred in specifying the geographic footprints in the metadata records, whereas the second will allow the encyclopedia patron to send a query to the gazetteer database to obtain the geographic location which can then be used as a spatial query to find the relevant entries and/or metadata records. The new gazetteer service and database follows the standards recently proposed for the Alexandria Digital Library Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara and will support place-based searches of the encyclopedia envisaged here. 

 

GeoSpatial Browser

 

A group of scholars and librarians at the University of Southern California have been working on a digital archive to represent, find, evaluate, and retrieve primary research materials about the Los Angeles Region for the past six years (Hunt and Ethington 1996, 1997). The GeoSpatial Broswer system aims to integrate radically different information types rapidly through place, time, format, and keyword indexing. The new system has an ArcIMS-based client interface and a backend supported by ArcSDE, Oracle 9i, and XML. The new GeoSpatial browser now under construction will offer the library patron a web-based query form with an interactive map that can be used to delineate the places or locations of interest and a series of pull down menus that can be used to specify the time periods, formats, collections, and keywords of interest. The system will also incorporate a gazetteer or list of geographic names that can be used in place of, and/or with, the interactive map display to specify places of interest. Several frames will also be provided for the display of the search results.  (Please see Appendix J for screen shot showing current GeoSpatial Browser interface)

 

4. Storage, maintenance, and protection of data:

 

The infrastructure designed for deLA will include both online and nearline storage.  Content to be delivered via the Web will require online storage.  Based on an estimated 4,250 entries of various lengths, 4,250 metadata records, and up to 12,000 associated digital object files of various types maintained by deLA (as opposed to links to resources

stored elsewhere), online storage needs by the end of the first four  years of deLA is estimated to reach 50gb with a growth rate of approximately 5 gb per year after that.  Nearline storage will be used to store archival quality digital objects unique to deLA.  These are not “archives” in the general sense, but full-resolution files used in preparation of the lower-resolution publishing versions of multimedia elements associated with the Entries.  Nearline storage needs are estimated to reach as high as 500gb by the end of the first three years, with a growth rate of 50gb after that.

 

A plan is actively in development within the Information Services Division at USC with implementation scheduled to be completed in 2002, to provide regular off-site storage of backups of all data.  The Digital Encyclopedia of Los Angeles will make use of this failsafe backup system for both its online and nearline content.

 

D.   Plan of Work

 

1.  “Editorial” and “Publishing” Offices

 

Given the strengths and inclinations of UCLA and USC, we have determined to establish two headquarters for the deLA project, designated as “Editorial” and “Publishing.”  The Editorial headquarters of deLA will be located at UCLA, which will house the central administrative functions of the project, the Managing Editor and related staff.  We plan to hold regular editorial meetings at this location, which will specialize in managing the workflow in the production of the textual entries.  The Publishing headquarters of deLA will be located at USC.  We intend that USC will specialize in the creation and maintenance of the databases, software systems, multimedia components, and Web search interface of the digital encyclopedia.  We call this entire process “Publishing” because it is directly analogous to the process of designing, producing, and distributing a comparable printed work.  The precise distinction between the functions of the UCLA and USC headquarters will follow this analogy: whenever content is being developed and reviewed (from whatever location), its progress through the Content Management System shall be supervised from the UCLA deLA Editorial Office; whenever content is being prepared for publication to “go live” on the Internet, and whenever the database or other software systems are being modified or maintained, such activity shall be supervised from the USC Publishing Office.

 

This Editorial/Publishing distinction is clear and useful for administrative purposes, but we also plan to maintain full integration of both parts of the project in all its conceptual aspects, without regard to institutional location or offices.  From a conceptual and planning perspective, editorial and publishing decisions are deeply interdependent. Members of USC publishing group will participate in the planning and policymaking editorial committees and members of UCLA editorial group will participate in the planning and policymaking publishing committees.

 

 

 

 

2.  Procedure for Creating Textual Essays and Entries

 

The General Editors, working with a Planning Board, will begin by finalizing about eight broad “Knowledge Domains” that will provide the overarching conceptual divisions, or navigational fields, according to which deLA will be organized at the highest level of generality.  Provisionally, these are: Arts and Architecture; Economy; Education and Information; Environment; Media and Entertainment; Politics and Government; Populations; Religion and Spirituality; and Science and Technology.  Within each of these domains we will identify some five to seven “Subject Areas” of major significance (e.g., “Architecture,” “Water,” and “Migration and Immigration”) that deserve extensive treatment.  The deLA Subject Term Thesaurus will be structured downward hierarchically from these broad Knowledge Domains and Subject Areas.  The Editors will work closely with the Lexicographer and Thesaurus Manager to assure both rationality and conformity with standards developed in more specialized thesauri such as the Arts and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT).

 

Some of these approximately forty to sixty second-level Subjects will be treated through “Interpretive Essays” of 8,000 words, each representing “state-of-the-art” knowledge, both historical and contemporary, about a key area.  For example, a leading scholar will write a long essay reflecting the best, most comprehensive information and thought about the Los Angeles dimensions of the topic of “Architecture,” a Subject Area within the Arts and Architecture domain.  Until completion of the editorial planning process in Year 1, we cannot say for certain whether all Subject Areas will enjoy equal treatment as regards Interpretive Essays and the refinement of subcategories.  For example, should “Architecture,” “Motion Pictures,” and  “Communities and Neighborhoods,” be treated as epistemologically comparable?  We shall leave to the editorial planning process to determine whether some Interpretive Essays will be synthetic in nature, rather than associated with a particular Subject area. 

 

In any case, the Interpretive Essays will provide the basis for refining the taxonomy of the subcategories to be addressed by shorter essays and entries.  In Appendix C and on the project website (http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/LAS/history/historylab/deLA/index.html), we provide a sample entry, on the architectural photographer Julius Shulman, and illustrate both where it would appear within our provisional taxonomy—in this case, Arts and Architectureà PhotographyàArchitectural Photographyà Julius  Shulman—and how it might be embedded in related multimedia resources.

 

In the initial stages of the project, the General Editors will work closely with members of a Planning Board (see Project Staffing below for more detail).  It will be the first order of business for the General Editors and the Planning Board to finalize the Domains and Subjects, and determine how they will be displayed on the website, in what different ways they will be visible and searchable, and how subordinate topics will be assigned within categories.  By means of a conference co-sponsored by UCLA, USC, and the Huntington Library planned for the fall of 2002, we will engage members of the Planning Board in several days of intensive discussion about these issues.  We anticipate that this conference, coupled with ongoing conversations between the General Editors and members of the Planning Board, will permit us to make very significant progress in refining the subject structure, as well as the deLA website’s feasible functional specifications, prior to the initial year of NEH funding.  The process of refining subject structure and identifying writers for deLA will then continue in the first year of NEH funding through:

 

(1) A further series of working conferences devoted to the method, organization, and content of deLA will be arranged at both UCLA and USC, but also at diverse area institutions involved in the project so that we gather the widest possible participation and points of view.  Such conferences, or in some cases informational meetings and focus groups, will include museums, libraries, public schools, local historical societies, community centers, and other interest group organizations.  Questionnaires about content and design will be developed for use with focus groups, and these will be an additional way of identifying potential writers for the encyclopedia.

 

(2) Our consultation in Los Angeles and in other locales where city or state encyclopedias are being produced with the editors and designers of those projects will provide a comparative perspective and significant instruction through the “lessons learned” in other projects.  We will take full advantage of the documents prepared and shared by these projects on the NEH-hosted website, http://www.neh.gov/projects/encyclopedias/index.html

 

 (3) We will undertake close study of already published works such as Pitt and Pitt’s  Los Angeles A to Z (1997) and the leading scholarly works on Los Angeles and Southern California included in our bibliography (as a starting point); we will conduct surveys involving local teachers at both secondary and college levels, and community groups of many kinds; and we will announce the project through different civic and historical organizations, through the Urban History Association Newsletter and website, and through various local Los Angeles media. 

 

Among other things, these discussions will allow us to set project priorities.  Because deLA need not be “completed” in order to be published, we will also over this same period of time make choices about which subject areas we would like to complete first.      

 

The Planning Board will eventually evolve into deLA’s Editorial Board, although some members will instead be part of its Advisory Board.  In addition, we anticipate appointing a small group of paid Senior Consulting Advisors who, in the initial two years of the project, will assist with key decisions concerning the content and design of deLA, including the choice of Associate Editors, and the subjects and assignments of the Interpretive Essays.  (Inevitably, a number of difficult decisions will need to be made over the life of the project by the General Editors.  The Senior Consulting Advisors will assist in reaching such decisions.)  Each of the forty to sixty Subject Areas will be assigned to an Associate Editor for oversight (some Associate Editors may oversee more than one Subject).  Most Associate Editors will write the major Interpretive Essays that coincide with Subjects.  Working and meeting with the General Editors and the Managing Editor, the Associate Editors will have these responsibilities: (1) to help identify the many subtopics, both large and small, pertaining to their particular Subject that need to be treated in the encyclopedia; (2) to help identify appropriate writers or, in some cases, extracts from published materials that will serve as essays or entries within the Subject area; (3) to help determine ways in which the essays and entries will be enhanced with different kinds of multimedia elements—photographs, film clips, audio files, maps, and other graphics; and (4) to suggest ways in which relevant existing databases of information can be profitably linked to or incorporated into the encyclopedia.  Associate Editors will be paid a flat consulting fee for this work (in addition to the fee paid if they also write an Interpretive Essay).  They will have the further responsibility of reviewing entries of 1,000 words or more within their Subject area upon delivery (for this work they will be paid on a per-entry basis).  Shorter entries will be reviewed only by project staff.  The initial focus will be on the Interpretive Essays, as many of which as possible will be assigned during the first year of funding, with a draft requested twelve months after assignment.  The draft will provide the basis for initial consultations about needed revisions or additions, and about appropriate hypermedia materials to be employed in conjunction with the essay.  By choosing several Domains and the Subjects within them for priority attention, and moving quickly to assign subordinate entries within those selected Subject areas, we aim to produce a significant proportion of the projected encyclopedia rapidly.  By the end of the third year of funding, we plan to have completed (final edited and catalogued) about 33% of the encyclopedia’s Entries.  These will have been entered into the Content Management System (CMS), ready to “go live” with the public Release 1.0 of deLA in project Year 4 (2007).

 

Guided by the Subject Areas and Interpretive Essays, we envision creating somewhat more than 4,000 essays and entries.  Although an encyclopedic work employing substantial multimedia resources and links to other reference material cannot really be “measured” in the same way as a published volume, if we think of deLA in textual terms alone, we anticipate a total word count of between two and three million words.  Some of these entries will be substantial essays in their own right, running from 1,000 to 4,000 words, but the majority will be typical encyclopedia entries of modest length of 100 to 600 words.  Such essays and entries will include all people, events, institutions, cultural activities, historic and architectural sites, environmental phenomena, business and professional organizations, and so on that define a comprehensively understood Los Angeles in both historical and contemporary terms.  (As indicated earlier, in some cases these “entries” may be constituted by an extract of published work licensed for deLA.)  Entries of 2000-4000 words will be devoted to major events (e.g., Northridge Earthquake), locales (e.g., Beverly Hills), institutions (e.g., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), and genres (e.g., Jazz).  Biographical entries will be anywhere from 100 words to 1000 words for seminal figures (e.g., architectural photographer Julius Shulman) or 2000 words for major figures (e.g., Mayor Tom Bradley).

 

In a digital work, the temptation to include many more long entries than would be possible in a normal printed volume must be countered by an appropriate sense of proportion.  Aware of the approximate word count in published encyclopedias (New York City’s is about 1.5 million words, in 4,300 entries; Chicago’s is about 1.2 million words, in 1,400 entries, not counting separate Biographical and Corporate “dictionaries”; the encyclopedia of New York State will have 5,000 entries), we have tried to estimate generously for expansion within reasonable limits.  So that we can maintain a degree of flexibility with respect to length, writers will be paid at a flat rate, rather than by per word.  For example, if an entry assigned at 2,000 words turns out to be accepted at 2,500 words, the rate of compensation would stay the same.  In view of the substantial additional assistance we will ask them to provide in identifying appropriate multimedia treatment and topics to be treated in related entries, writers of the 8,000-word Interpretive Essays will receive $1,500.  Other entries will be compensated at the rates indicated, which works out to a little more than .12/word for the specified length, with a $50 minimum. Writers of Interpretive Essays and writers of entries in the 1-4,000 range will be asked to complete a questionnaire relating to relevant multimedia.  (If any authors are capable of designing appropriate hypermedia elements for their entries and wish to do so, they will work closely with the deLA design staff and be paid at a consulting rate to be determined.)   For purposes of planning, we have assumed that the cost of a licensed written entry of a certain length is comparable to the cost of newly created work.  In planning to assign word limits at a specified count but anticipating the need to accept longer entries where warranted, we envision a matrix of essays and entries roughly as follows for the complete “first edition” of the project: 

 

1.         50        8,000 words     = 400,000 words         @ $1500         = $75,000                   

2.         100      4,000 words     = 400,000 words         @ $500           = $50,000                   

3.         100      2,000 words     = 200,000 words         @ $250           = $25,000                   

4.         500      1,000 words     = 500,000 words         @ $125           = $62,500                   

5.         1000    600 words        = 600,000 words         @ $75             = $75,000                   

6.         1000    400 words        = 400,000 words         @ $50             = $50,000       

7.         1500    1-200 words    = 200,000 words         @ $50             = $75,000                   

 

total:     4250 entries                 = 2,700,000 words                              = $412,500

 

The review and editing of essays, as we now envision it, will take several forms.  As already indicated, Associate Editors will play the further editorial role of helping to review and edit submitted entries of 1,000 words or more.  In addition, the Editorial office at UCLA (see below) will include research assistants who are either in-house Graduate Student Researchers or off-campus Research Assistants, acting as independent contractors (including some writers of essays), who will assist in fact-checking, copyediting, insuring that entries conform to the deLA Style Handbook (see below), and, along with the Managing Editor and relevant Associate Editor, determining that the entry has met appropriate standards for interpretation and accuracy.  Where necessary, one or another of these individuals will rewrite essays (according to the experience of previous projects, rewriting will be necessary in about 10% of cases).  In other cases, these individuals will be charged with writing entries in-house when appropriate writers cannot be located or fail to deliver the promised work.

 

Submitted essays and entries will be expected to conform to a set of editorial and stylistic standards to be developed by the General Editors, the Editorial Board, and the staffs of the Editorial and Publishing offices.  The Managing Editor and research staff, as described above, will be in charge of insuring that all submissions meet appropriate standards for accuracy and style.  We have consulted the materials posted on the NEH website entitled “Documents Related to the Preparation of Online State Encyclopedias” http://www.neh.gov/projects/encyclopedias/index.html  We will have many occasions to refer to the models available there as we compose appropriate contributor invitation letters, contracts, contributor information sheets, follow-up letters concerning revision, delinquency, and so forth.  Of particular importance as models for review are the several “Writer’s Guides to Manuscript Preparation” for the Encyclopedia of Chicago History, the “Content and Copyediting Manual” and “Project Manual” for the Encyclopedia of New York State, the “Guidelines of Authors” for the New Jersey Encyclopedia, the “Author’s Guide to Manuscript Preparation” for the Encyclopedia of the Midwest, and the “Guidelines for Contributors” for the Encyclopedia of New England Culture.  Each of these documents will offer important guidance as we prepare several important online documents: (1) the “deLA Style Handbook,” a guide for writers and editors alike to manuscript preparation according to conventional usages adopted throughout the encyclopedia, including the appropriate reference to photographs, maps, illustrations, hyperlinks, and bibliographical citations; (2) the “deLA Guidelines for Authors,” a protocol that will ensure consistency of treatment within the respective categories of entries; and (3) the “deLA Guide to Research,” a compilation and analysis of the resources available in print, in archival collections, and online pertaining to research on Los Angeles.  Along with the deLA Bibliography, the deLA Guide to Research will evolve over the life of the project and, once finalized, remain posted permanently on its website for the use of other scholars.  We will consult closely with the staff of previous projects to determine what features of their guidelines have been most advantageous.

 

3.  Procedure for Creating Multimedia Materials 

 

As a fully digital work, deLA will make extensive use of multimedia materials.  While the possibilities for deploying various types of multimedia materials are theoretically boundless, we plan to proceed in a relatively conservative manner, avoiding cutting-edge technologies that may cause problems on the computers of many users, and favoring established standards.  We plan to make extensive use of still photographic image files, in the compressed Web standard “JPG” format, as well as significant use of audio files in the compressed Web standard “.MP3” format.  Motion picture video clips will also be deployed, with the standard to be determined during Year 1 research.   Our most advanced core feature is the “Geobrowser,” enabling spatial searches of the deLA database, via dynamic maps. Those maps are being prepared by the USC GIS Lab. This Geobrowser has been under development for 7 years now at USC and will be accessed directly in the deLA website.  In some special cases, we will deploy more advanced technology, but only after careful testing.  A proposed example is to produce a 3-dimensional model of the historic core of Los Angeles, El Pueblo, produced by William Jepson of the UCLA School of Architecture’s Urban Simulation Laboratory.  Such an interactive 3-D model might appear in a special window, but much planning will be required to make these advanced resources feasible.

 

The primary impact of multimedia materials in deLA will be through the various modes of searching available to the user.  The ability to access Photo Galleries, oral histories, maps, and video clips from many different search modes will make maximum use of multimedia materials, without risking the longevity of the project.  In future years, as newer media become unquestionably standard, the Editors may consider expanding to include such formats.

 

The Publishing team will fully evaluate the best standards for the submission of each type of multimedia element, and then work out a processing procedure.  Our priority in Year 1 will be to clarify completely which types of multimedia formats are open for the Authors to select.  As Interpretive Essays and major entries related to them are assigned, the Design Group, including the Multimedia Editor, the Photo Editor, the Cartographic Editor, will consult with the Author and begin researching and acquiring appropriate materials that will become part of the hypermedia matrix of which the textual document is part. 

 

Once these preferences are established, the Multimedia Editor will acquire the full-resolution digitized copies and store them with proper metadata in the near-line full-resolution storage data repository.  deLA rules for “Web derivatives”--meaning low-resolution publishing versions—will be produced from these storage copies.  The key to integrating all the multimedia elements into each Interpretive Essay and Entry will be their proper metadata coding in the Content Management System (CMS).  We will have developed a series of templates, so that images and audio clips and maps and video clips will be inserted into the templates on the fly, once a given Entry is summoned by the user.

 

4.  Educational Components

 

a.  Primary and Secondary Education

 

In order to ensure that deLA is designed with the needs of area secondary and primary schoolchildren in mind, we will draw on our contacts via UCLA and USC’s schools of education to form a partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), among other educational entities, to survey closely the ways in which the project can be made most valuable to students of all ages in the Los Angeles area.  (In the “California Framework” used in curriculum planning in the public schools, the city’s and state’s history and culture appears as a formal part of the curriculum in grade four, but a myriad of relevant curricular topics will be supported by our range of materials).  In consultation with teachers, administrators, and educational professionals at the university level, we will identify and develop aspects of the encyclopedia that will be most valuable in teaching the city’s young people, and those elsewhere, about this extraordinary international city.  Our first step will be to consult widely with administrators and teachers in the LAUSD.  To this end, working with professors in our respective schools of education, we will convene focus groups throughout the city to discuss our plans.  As we begin implementation, we will continue those consultations so that teachers (and students) have an opportunity to tell us what they need and want, what works well and what does not.  We will establish a group of educational consultants, consisting of selected K-12 administrators and teachers to assist us in these issues and to help test the utility of deLA for area students.  Professor Janice Reiff's letter of support (see Appendix F) indicates the potential interest already established among some areas.

 

b.  University Education and Research

 

deLA will provide opportunities for graduate students (and in some cases advanced undergraduates) to be involved in the creation of a major and innovative reference work.  The General Editors will build some of their instruction at their respective universities around the project, and by the third year of the project they plan to offer one or more joint graduate seminars on the topic of scholarship in digital media using deLA as a case study.  In the initial years of the project, each General Editor will conduct one or more courses each year focused on the culture and history of Los Angeles.  Eric Sundquist, for example, will develop a UCLA seminar on “The Literature of Los Angeles” that will serve as a test bed for understanding the range and scope of its topic, with particular attention to the recovery of lost literary voices, those that appeared in community newspapers or ephemeral magazines.  Philip Ethington, for example, will offer a USC graduate seminar on “Los Angeles as Interdisciplinary Subject.”  Courses offered by the General Editors on these or broader topics will also be an occasion to introduce students to some of the wide array of area scholars serving in editorial or advisory capacities on the project.  UCLA has committed to fund two Graduate Student Researchers per year for three years (and we expect that USC may do the same).  Graduate Student Researchers will gain invaluable experience in carrying out research and writing connected with the project, and learning how to create scholarship using digital media.  As the project evolves, additional graduate students and advanced undergraduates will be hired, as appropriate, to assist in research and editing.

 

5.  Fundraising Plans

 

We are well aware that the projected overall (two campus) budget for this project’s first three years ($3.4 million) is far in excess of the available NEH funding and wish here to emphasize a) that both of our universities are fully committed to raising the needed funds, and b) that we feel confident these funds can be raised on time.  First, we believe that a successful NEH grant will be a vital cornerstone to the overall fundraising efforts.  Potential funding institutions and private donors will be strongly encouraged by the NEH 1:1 matching provision for the amount beyond the initial $350,000, up to an additional $350,000. Next, both campuses have already begun a major fundraising effort on behalf of this project.  The UCLA offices of Corporate, Foundation and Research Relations, Major Gifts, Development and Strategic Research Initiatives - North Campus, have already begun developing fundraising strategies for deLA including identifying prospective individual donors.  Further, UCLA has already received strong interest from a major national foundation.  USC’s Development offices for the University, the College of Letters Arts and Sciences, and the Information Services Division have all been instructed by the President Steven Sample’s office and the offices of Dean Joseph Aoun (LAS) and Dean Jerry Campbell (ISD) to make this project a fundraising priority.  In fact, USC has already received a $25,000 pledge from ATT Corporation specifically for the deLA project.  We are currently preparing a grant application to the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation for a six-figure amount, and are making plans to approach the Getty Trust at a very high level for a significant sum.  It should be noted that the Chicago Tribune (which now owns the Los Angeles Times) contributed $1 million to the Encyclopedia of Chicago History, which we take as an indication of the potential for fundraising among corporations with strong interests in the goals of deLA.

 

Fundraising for the project will focus on individuals, corporations, and foundations with strong ties to Southern California, and national foundations with strong interests in history and culture.  Among the business sectors that will be targeted for the project are the telecommunications, print, gaming, cartography, and entertainment industries.  Additional fundraising leads will be sought from the Advisory Board members and key individuals within the greater Los Angeles community.  Major funding will be recognized on the project’s website.  (The Canadian Encyclopedia, to take one example, includes a page identifying its governmental, foundation, corporate sponsors by means of a “brand” icon that links to the entity’s homepage.)

 

As indicated in their letters of support, the Chancellor Albert Carnesale of UCLA and Acting President Lloyd Armstrong of USC have stated their willingness to count deLA among their institutions’ fundraising priorities.  We believe this gives the project an exceptional chance of fundraising success.  An important component of this joint effort will be the fact that fundraising for deLA will be targeted at the project itself, rather than at each school (even though budgeting will require funds to be spent at one institution or the other), and potential donors, whether individuals, foundations, corporations, or government agencies, will be approached with this inter-institutional cooperation in mind. 

 

6.  Timeline for Project Planning and Implementation

 

Here we outline our projected accomplishments over the next six years.  The initial year (7/2002-6/2003), prior to any potential NEH funding, we call “Year 0” to distinguish it from the three project Years 1 to 3 (FY04 to FY06).  We provide details for these years, plus the subsequent two, Years 4 and 5 (FY07 and FY08), because those are the years in which the deLA is initially published via the World Wide Web and made available to the public.  Below is a prose description of work during each year. 

 

(Please see Appendix H for detailed, month-by-month task lists).

 

Planning “Year 0”: July 2002-June 2003

 

The General Editors will continue to refine plans by studying comparable web-based scholarly projects and consulting with area and other scholars.  Eric Sundquist will be released 50% time by UCLA to begin compiling detailed lists of subjects to be treated in textual essays and entries, and identifying potential Associate Editors and writers.  Philip Ethington, in his capacity as Information Services Division Associate Dean for Regional Initiatives at USC will also be supported 50% time to engage in the same activities as Sundquist, plus coordinating the preparatory work among USC’s deLA Publishing Team.  Both General Editors will continue to negotiate with authors of existing reference works, such as Pitt and Pitt, Los Angeles A to Z (1997) and Gebhard and Winter, Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide (1994 and earlier edition), to determine the feasibility of licensing portions of those works.  During the fall of 2002, UCLA, USC, and the Huntington Library will host a conference whose purpose will be to gather members of the Planning Board for extensive conversations about the content and design of deLA.  The conference will build upon an ongoing seminar series at the Huntington devoted to Los Angeles as a subject of scholarly inquiry.  As already noted, the conference will provide a further way to engage additional area scholars as members of the Planning Board, to gain the support and affiliation of additional area institutions, and to lay the groundwork for the assignment of writing and creative tasks once funding for the project is in place.  Our goal by December 2002 is to finalize the short list of Knowledge Domains and to clarify which 30-40% of the Subject Areas will be prioritized during Phase 1 of the assigning process.  We expect to enter Year 1 with many of the Associate Editors named and a significant number of the Interpretive Essays provisionally assigned, pending funding.  As described above, we also hope to accomplish additional fundraising during the coming year, as well as subsequent years, so that we will enter Year 1 with additional support identified and committed.

 

Year 1 (2003-4)

 

The first NEH funded project year will be devoted to critical set-up tasks.  We shall establish the Editorial Office at UCLA by hiring a Managing Editor and Project Support Staff.  The first batch of Senior Advising Editors and Associate Editors will be appointed, based on the Huntington Planning Conference and consultations during Year 0.  Once this Editorial Board is in place, the General Editors will assign the first 20 Interpretive Essays, written primarily by the Associate Editors.  The Managing Editor will prioritize the creation of the “deLA Style Handbook” and the “deLA Guide for Authors.”  Managing Editor will also work with the Publishing Office to build into those guides author requirements for TEI markup, multimedia content format and files size rules, and so on.  General Editors will work with Managing Editor to select pilot excerpts from existing works for licensing.  Later in the year, after the Senior Editors have worked on their Interpretive Essays, a list of Entries covering essential subcategories will be compiled and General Editors will assign these for “Phase 1” Entries.  Each “Phase” of assigned entries will have a two-year cycle, with editorial review of first drafts in one year and final drafts submitted electronically at the end of two years.  The Publishing Office will also be laying groundwork during this project year, beginning with the hiring of a full-time Publishing Project Manager.  The Photo Editor will negotiate with the leading archives the research and use privileges to be accorded the deLA authors.  The Photo Editor will also create a selection, digital conversion, tracking, and licensing system, to be implemented in the Content Management System.  The Geography Editor will consult with Editorial Board and begin to create a LA Basin Base Map, to be used for all navigational and area-of-interest maps.  The Lexicographer will begin to build the deLA  Subject Thesaurus, while the Metadata Advisor evaluates and selects the authoritative list of existing thesauri to use where possible.  Metadata Advisor and Lexicographer will consult with Shoah Project staff and other allied projects for guidance. During this year USC continues implementation of the Content Management System (CMS), and the Information Technology Group begins to adapt this CMS for deLA project use.

 

Year 2 (2004-5)

 

Year 2 will involve far less start-up, but we will hire an Assistant Managing Editor to handled the flow of first draft Interpretive Essays and Entries, which shall be reviewed, edited, and returned to the authors.  These drafts will also be used by the Publishing Office to refine the deLA Subject Thesaurus, metadata schema, and to begin specific photo and multimedia selection for these entries.  The Publishing Office will finalize rules for multimedia submissions and Web derivatives (e.g., what size and compression for the image “JPEGs,” audio “MP3’s” and so on).  Lexicographer and metadata advisor will continue to build the thesauri and cataloging schema, and the Information Technology Team will develop the workflow process for the Content Management System.

 

Year 3 (2005-6)

The high point of Year 3 will be the final submission of the Phase 1 Interpretive Essays and Entries, approximately 30% of the projected deLA.  The Authors will submit these essays electronically, by using their Web browsers to connect to the Content Management System at USC.  The Publishing group at USC will be expanded significantly during this year to bring the CMS into full operation.  Thus, the two parallel efforts of the deLA project will come together:  The Editorial Office will have assigned and produced its first batch of Entries, and the Publishing Office will have established the basic information infrastructure to support the perpetual growth and updating of the deLA. In fact, the General Editors will now be ready to assign the Phase 2 Interpretive Essays and Entries, (beginning another cycle that will culminate in Year 5).  The Information Technology Team will finalize the link management schema for the Supplemental Databases, the metadata schema will be fine-tuned, the CMS infrastructure will be finalized, and a testing approach will be designed.  Importantly, the Web Design Group will now be able to begin its work.  Under the supervision of Victoria Vesna, Chair of the Design | Media Arts Department at UCLA, student course work will be devoted to designing the search and navigational interfaces, as well as the Web templates for the CMS to produce these pages on the fly.  By the end of the three-year NEH grant, we will have both the content and the system in place to begin publication during Year 4.

 

 

 

 

Year 4 (2006-7)

 

Year 4  will be focused on the first release of deLA, with a “Go Live” date set for June 2007.  The Editorial Office will be focused on the reception and editing of the first drafts of Phase 2 Interpretive Essays and Entries.  The Publishing Office will intensively implement the Design Group’s Web interface, and begin beta testing of the deLA as a live publication.  Re-design will be conducted by another year-long course assignment in the Design | Media Arts Department, based on beta testing.  We shall plan an Editorial Board conference to review the Beta test release of deLA 1.0 in April 2007, with full public access scheduled for June 2007.

 

Year 5 (2007-8)

 

During Year 5 we will have the opportunity to receive a great deal of user feedback, and we plan to capitalize on this by holding more focus group sessions with K-12 educators and students, and also by planning a large regional and national conference to review the deLA project.  The final submissions of Phase 2 Interpretive Essays and Entries will be received and edited, and these will be prepared for public release in May of 2008.  That release will constitute deLA Release 2.0, with at least 66% of the projected encyclopedia completed.  Continued testing and feedback will lead to the re-design of Web templates, as the Design Group continues periodic revisions.  General Editors and Associate Editors will assign Phase 3 Interpretive Essays and Entries, which will be due in final form in 2010, at which time the Encyclopedia will contain the full complement of 4,250 Entries originally projected. 

 

Years 5-onward

 

From Year 5 onward, however, revision and expansion of the Entries will be an ongoing process.  The Content Management System (CMS) will allow updating of any single entry as required by historical change or new research.  Such modifications will be a matter decided by the Editorial Board.  The project should be on a permanent funding basis at this point, with the ability to revise and expand on an incremental basis for generations to come.

 

   E.  Project Staffing

 

General Editors

 

Philip J. Ethington (USC) and Eric J. Sundquist (UCLA) will co-direct the entire project, and supervise the work of the Senior Editors, the different boards described below, and all project staff.  Brief résumés for the General Editors may be found in Appendix D.  All essays, entries, and multimedia materials will be approved by the General Editors.  While the General Editors will jointly determine the best policies and daily direction for every aspect of the project, they will also specialize to a significant degree in the supervision of the activities taking place on their respective campuses. 

 

Boards

 

Advisory Board

 

Members of the Advisory Board, representing a wider array of area institutions, civic and business organizations, community groups, and professions, will help to insure that all appropriate approaches to Los Angeles as an historical and civic entity have been taken into account.  Given their busy schedules, we will draw sparingly on the time of these individuals but actively solicit their advice on the project’s scope and audience, as well as matters relevant to their own fields.  The Advisory Board will constitute a network through which the editors can communicate with the city’s leadership and people, and identify sources of funding for the project.  Some members of the current Planning Board will become members not of the Editorial Board but rather the Advisory Board.

 

Planning Board

 

The Planning Board is composed of individuals who have agreed to review proposals for deLA and made an initial commitment to consult regularly about it during the year prior to the proposed NEH funding (2002-03), as well as during the initial year of funding (2003-04).  A complete list of Planning Board members, with biographical sketches, appears in Appendix E. These individuals represent the diverse major educational, cultural, and civic institutions of the Los Angeles area.  Their skills in areas ranging from regional economics to popular culture are invaluable for (1) provoking the widest conceptual refinement of deLA during its crucial planning phases; (2) helping to establish the scope and methodology of the project; and (3) through the course of our planning conversations helping the General Editors to determine who will become members of a more permanent Editorial Board and an Advisory Board.

 

Editorial Board

 

As deLA evolves, a subset of the Planning Board, though perhaps a large subset, will become the Editorial Board and be so listed formally on the project website. The Editorial Board, made up primarily of the projects Associate Editors, will be responsible for specific topical or creative areas of the project and/or be charged with designing or writing substantial portions of the project, including the Interpretive Essays.  They will also help identify additional writers and creative participants.  Initial members of the Editorial Board will be named during the first year of proposed NEH funding.  As described above, we will anticipate identifying a small group of Senior Consulting Advisors to assist in key decisions, in addition to the Associate Editors who will be charged with oversight of the forty to sixty Subject categories.  (We note that the Encyclopedia of New York City had seventy Associate Editors.)  In all cases, members of the Editorial Board will share in ongoing decisions about content and format of the encyclopedia, and as senior figures in academic or institutional settings they will represent the high scholarly standards to which deLA will be held at all times. 

 

Technical Advisory Board

 

The Technical Advisory Board will be composed of faculty and staff from UCLA and USC and will provide high-level advice on an ongoing basis to deLA, specifically in the areas related to computing (database, software, metadata, standards, functional specifications, design features, and web publishing).  These individuals have invaluable experience in these areas.  In addition, once the project is underway, a separate Information Technology Group will be formed to include representatives from those organizations contributing digital materials to deLA.  This group will ensure the effective and uniform implementation of standards and operability requirements developed by the deLA Project Staff in consultation with the Technical Advisory Board. (See Appendix E.)

 

Educational Board

 

This Board will be formed from faculty in the UCLA and USC Schools of Education, and from educators in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Los Angeles County Office of Education, and education professionals from other regional universities and institutions.  The primary role will be to provide guidance in the design of deLA to meet the curricular needs of the K-12 student audience, but it will also examine the same fit for college students.

 

Design Advisory Board

 

The Design Board will be composed of faculty and staff from UCLA and USC and will provide high-level advice on aesthetic issues relating to the photographic, multimedia, cartographic, and website design aspects of deLA.  This Design Advisory Board will help to form the Web Design Group of compensated project members during Year 1 of the project.  Both the Design Advisory Board and the Design Group will work with the priorities set by the Editorial and Information Technology Boards and Groups, to set goals and standards consistent with the intellectual goals and cost parameters of the project.

 

Editorial Office (UCLA)

 

Managing Editor.  Manages workflow, business plan, and budget, and reports directly to the General Editors.  Works closely with Publishing Project Manager, who is based at USC.  Organizes editorial meetings at UCLA and organizes and participates in publishing meetings at USC.  Once the CMS is operational, oversees its editorial dimension, tracking all entries, writers, and contracts, as well as the editing process once essays and entries have been submitted.  Experience will include background in encyclopedic or comparable reference works, advanced degree in urban studies or a related field, demonstrated ability to work at sophisticated level with scholarly work in digital media.

 

Assistant Managing Editor.  Assists managing editor with arranging meetings, implementation of writing assignments, based on decisions by General Editors, Senior Editors, and Managing Editor.  Assist in writing the deLA Style Handbook, the deLA Guidelines for Authors, the deLA Guide to Research, letter templates, and related editorial documents. 

 

Graduate Student Researchers.  Carry out research, assist in preparation of lists of entries, locate source materials, fact-check and copy edit entries.  Two per year, including summers, provided by UCLA for initial three years of project.  (See above for description of educational characteristics of these positions.) 

 

Other Research Assistants.  Also carry out research, assist in preparation of lists of entries, locate source materials, fact-check and edit entries.  These assistants, hired at an hourly rate, will include UCLA and USC graduate students, librarians, area scholars who are involved otherwise as writers of essays, recent graduates with backgrounds in relevant fields, and other professionals.  The great range of academic and cultural institutions throughout the Los Angeles area ensures a very deep pool of individuals at all levels. 

 

Publishing Office (USC)

 

Publishing Project Manager

Manages workflow for the Publishing group, and manages Publishing budget, and reports directly to the General Editors.  Works closely with Managing Editor, who is based at UCLA.  Organizes Publishing meetings with all relevant deLA project members, and participates in relevant Editorial meetings at UCLA.  Organizes the process of specifying the requirements of the Content Management System (CMS), and the implementation of that system as the central backbone of the deLA workflow process. Coordinates all information technology tasks and Web Design tasks, including testing and revisions.  Experience will include strong background in information technology project management and demonstrated ability to work at sophisticated level with scholarly work in digital media.

 

Thesaurus Editor.  Supervises the creation and then the management of the deLA thesauri. Will develop and chair the review board and process for dealing with new candidate terms or alterations to existing terms.  Supervises work of Thesaurus Manager.

 

Photo Editor.  Supervises the selection and licensing of still images from archives.

 

Multimedia Editor.  Supervises the selection, formatting, processing, and licensing of audio, audio-visual, and other non-still image digital formats.

 

Geography Editor.  John P. Wilson, Professor of Geography and Director, USC GIS Lab.  Supervises the production and design of cartographic elements (principally dynamic GIS maps).

 

Web Designers  Working from specifications developed by deLA publishing staff, the design team will create a series of Web templates for the search and display interfaces of various types of encyclopedia entries and associated materials.  Most of the Web design will be handled by faculty and students, currently planned to be drawn from the UCLA Design | Media Arts Department, under the supervision of Professor and Chair Victoria Vesna.  We have also budgeted 100 hours of Web design consultant time to mediate between this course work and the implementation.

 

Electronic Publishing Technical Coordinator.  Works closely Technical Publishing Team, and Editorial units in Year 1 and 2 (FY04 and FY05), to research and design information architecture, technical requirements, and determine what is needed to fit deLA’s unique requirements into the current USC environment, including its CIS and the campus’ information environment.  Serves as connection between Publishing Project Manager and consultants/temporary staffing and USC staffing connected to deLA.  Assists in coordinating outsourced work.  Will coordinate management reports to and from Publishing Project Manager and Managing Editor, and analyze reports to plan for changes and enhancements.

 

Please Note:  Additional project positions are listed and described in “USC Subcontract Budget Notes.”  There it is explained which positions will be contributed by USC, which shall be funded by the NEH grant, and which will be funded by third-party funds.

 

F.  Dissemination and Sustainability

 

We have little doubt that the Digital Encyclopedia of Los Angeles will enjoy far greater dissemination than any print encyclopedia could hope for.  Especially considering two of the target audiences, K-12 students and college/university communities, there is close to 100% accessibility via the schools.  Every regional public and private school now makes computers with Internet access available to the students.  Every public library also has a public Web browser, and the colleges and universities provide even better access.  We are planning for a target of potentially thousands of users each week.  Access to the Internet within lower-income households is certainly not as good as that for middle- and upper-income households, but even here we may expect something approaching 100% household access in years to come, repeating the pattern of television ownership by the late 1960s.

 

We are particularly committed to guaranteeing the longevity of deLA: it is planned to last for generations to come.  Unlike a printed encyclopedia, which will become increasing outdated after a decade or two, the deLA will be updated on a regular basis.  We currently plan to publish the Phase 1 Entries by June 2007, the Phase 2 Entries by June 2008, and the full complement of originally-planned Interpretive Essays and Entries to be completed no later than the year 2010.  At that point, the project will redesign itself to becoming a sustaining organization, dedicated to updating, revising, and expanding the deLA coverage on an incremental basis perpetually.  Of particular interest in this regard is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, whose entries are updated periodically by their authors after review by the Editorial Board, with the whole encyclopedia archived every six months so that the “current” work is live while the most recently archived work—the most recent published “edition,” so to speak—is the authoritative work for citation.  We plan to consult with the Stanford project closely, to make full use of their experience.

 

It is important to realize, however, that the same underlying system will be used from the beginning, to manage such updating.  The same system used to create the deLA will be ideally suited to updating it in the future. It is also important to realize that the content itself will be separately maintained from the applications in standard format ensuring that if the Content Management System itself becomes obsolete and needs to be replaced, the underlying content can always be “migrated” to a new system. We feel very certain that the content created under our plan will have permanent, library-standard durability as a “collection” just like any other.  In any case, the two universities at the very highest level have pledged a commitment to the long life of this encyclopedia.