A meeting was held at King's College, London, on 26th and 27th October 2009, between representatives of the following networks, infrastructure projects, and planning initiatives working with digital technologies in the Arts and Humanities:

• arts-humanities.net (http://www.arts-humanities.net/)
• ADHO - Association of Digital Humanities Organisations (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/)
• CLARIN (http://www.clarin.eu/)
• centerNet (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/centernet/)
• DARIAH (http://www.dariah.eu/)
• NoC - Network of Expert Centres in Great Britain and Ireland (http://www.arts-humanities.net/noc/)
• Project Bamboo (http://projectbamboo.org/)
• TextGrid (http://www.textgrid.de/)

We identified the current fragmented environment where researchers operate in separate areas with often mutually incompatible technologies as a barrier to fully exploiting the transformative role that these technologies can potentially play. We resolved that our present, proposed, and future activities are interdependent and complementary and should be oriented towards working together to overcome barriers, and to create a shared environment where technology services can interoperate and be sustained, thus enabling new forms of research in the Humanities.

In order to achieve these goals we agreed to form the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks – CHAIN. CHAIN will act as a forum forareas of shared interest to its participants, including:
− advocacy for an improved digital research infrastructure for the Humanities;
− development of sustainable business models;
− promotion of technical interoperability of resources, tools and services;
− promotion of good practice and relevant technical standards;
− development of a shared service infrastructure;
− coordinating approaches to legal and ethical issues;
− interactions with other relevant computing infrastructure initiatives;
− widening the geographical scope of our coalition.

CHAIN will promote an open culture where experiences, including successes and failures, can be shared and discussed, in order to support and promote the use of digital technologies in research in the Humanities.

Sheila Anderson, King's College, London (DARIAH)
Andreas Aschenbrenner, State and University Library Göttingen (TextGrid, DARIAH)
David Greenbaum, University of California, Berkeley (Project Bamboo)
Seth Denbo, King's College, London (DARIAH)
Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland (centerNet)
Chad Kainz, University of Chicago (Project Bamboo)
Steven Krauwer, Utrecht University (CLARIN)
Lorna Hughes, King's College, London (ADHO, NoC)
Tobias Blanke, King's College, London (DARIAH)
Torsten Reimer, King's College, London (arts-humanities.net)
David Robey, University of Oxford (NoC)
Harold Short, King's College, London (ADHO)
Katherine Walter, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (centerNet)
Peter Wittenburg, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (CLARIN)
Martin Wynne, University of Oxford (CLARIN, DARIAH)

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Bamboo is community-driven cyberinfrastructure planning project for the arts and humanities led by the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley. Bamboo strives to create a consortium of universities, colleges, libraries, organizations, and industry partners committed to supporting research, teaching and learning in the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences. The approach central to the planning project is one rooted in creating, reusing, remixing, and sharing technology services across project, institutional, organizational, regional, and national boundaries. The fundamental thought behind this approach is that if we can share technologies and content in common ways, we will be able to reduce the overall effort in the long term to create new digital projects, increase the potential for greater innovation as more effort can be placed on new ideas rather than recreating existing solutions, take best advantage of specialized skill sets across the various communities to solve problems, and leverage institutional and community-wide economies of scale to tackle problems and sustain critical projects.

For more information or if your institution or organization would like to become a Bamboo member or partner, send email to bamboo_feedback@lists.berkeley.edu