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This document describes Digital Resources for the Humanities
(DRH) a non-profit making organization set up for
the sole purpose of holding an annual conference
which "promotes the creation, management, dissemination, use and
preservation of scholarly digital resources of high quality"
for the benefit of humanities scholarship.
DRH is a UK-based international conference.
The logo or brand for the conference consists of the letters "DRH" followed by digits indicating the year.
This document has been formally agreed to by representatives of the Sponsoring Organizations which created and ran the first four DRH conferences (Oxford 1996 and 1997, Glasgow 1998, Kings 1999). It defines a protocol for the conduct of all future conferences under this brand.
The DRH Conference as an institution is governed by a Standing
Committee, whose members act as representatives of various
Sponsoring Organizations. Individual conferences are run by a
Programme Committee, which is appointed annually by the
Standing Committee.
The current Sponsoring Organizations, and their representatives, are listed
below:
Sponsorship implies some tangible committment to the conference each year, in cash, time, or both.
New sponsoring organizations may be added (or removed) with approval of a two-thirds majority of the Standing Committee.
Sponsoring organizations must be based in the UK.
The Standing Committee is the executive authority for the
DRH Conference. It is composed of
The Standing Committee should not exceed 12 members, and should not contain fewer than six. Additional members representing particular interests of relevance to the conference may be co-opted to serve with the agreement of two-thirds of the existing committee members.
The Chair of the Standing Commitee should be elected annually from
its membership. The same person may serve up to a maximum of three
years consecutively.
Membership of the Standing Committee is for a renewable term of one year.
The Standing Committee will meet at least twice annually, usually in the course of the DRH conference, once to appoint members to the Programme Committee, and once to review proposals to host the conference.
The Programme Committee for a given conference should normally be appointed at the SC meeting one year before the conference is held, and at the latest in advance of the Call for Proposals for that conference.
The SC is responsible for determining the composition of the Programme Committe. It should normally include one member of the SC (often, but not necessarily, its Chair) to act as Conference Chair, one representative from the site holding the conference to act as Local Organizer, and at least three other members of the Standing Committee. The same individual may not be both Conference Chair and Local Organizer.
The Programme Committee has responsibility for determining the academic programme of the conference. Planning and running of all other aspects of the conference is the responsibility of the Local Organizer, in consultation with the Conference Chair.
The Programme Committee should conduct the majority of its business electronically, meeting only as needed. However, at least one face to face meeting will be necessary to finalize the academic programme of the conference, and this should be timetabled well in advance.
Bids to host DRH will be solicited annually, two years in advance, and evaluated by the Standing Committee
Evaluation criteria will include:
The Protocol defined by this document must be formally accepted by a potential Local Organizer as a part of the bidding procedure.
Bids should be submitted to the Standing Committee at least two years in advance; successful bids will be announced at the conclusion of the DRH conference two years before hand.
The conference will typically contain a mixture of
Not all of these components need be present in each conference. It is the responsibility of the Programme Committee to agree on the mixture for a given year, and to ensure an appropriate balance amongst them. The Appendix to this document includes further, non-binding, suggestions about ways of organizing these components in a way which has been found to be successful in previous conferences.
For a given conference, a Call for Participation (CFP) will be issued in November of the year preceding the conference, specifying the components required. Preparation of the CFP is the responsibility of the Local Organiser. It may not however be published without approval by a two-thirds majority of the Programme Committee.
Proposals for posters, papers, and sessions at a conference will be evaluated by the Programme Committee, with the assistance of external reviewers as appropriate.
Special sessions or papers may be solicited by members of the Programme Committee or others, but should also be reviewed.
Subject to prior approval by a two-thirds majority of the Programme Committee, the Local Organizer and Programme Chair may also invite a small number (two, or exceptionally three) of plenary speakers, whose contributions will not be subject to review.
The Conference Chair and Local Organizer will jointly assign proposals to individual reviewers taken from a list maintained by the Standing Committee. Neither the Conference Chair nor the Local Organizer for a conference may submit a proposal, unless by invitation of the Programme Committee. Members of the Programme Committee and reviewers may submit proposals, but every effort must be made to ensure impartiality and confidentiality. Reviewers should be asked to declare any possible conflict of interest which may affect their judgment of proposals submitted to them.
The Programme Committee will decide on a review protocol
(covering such topics as the number of reviewers for each proposal,
conduct of the review, default actions etc.). Some suggested
guidelines are given in the Appendix to this document: in general, all
academic contributions to the conference should be peer-reviewed.
Proposals from commercial companies are welcomed, provided that they are not solely intended to promote a particular service. They should be reviewed in the same way as academic proposals. Proposals of a purely commercial or promotional nature should form part of a software demonstration or exhibition strand rather than the academic programme.
The Conference will normally take place in September each year, at a venue determined two years in advance. Bids to host a conference should therefore be received by the Standing Committee in sufficient time for them to be evaluated and a decision taken at the meeting held during the conference two years ahead.
The programme committee should normally be appointed one year ahead of the start of the conference. Its first business should be to agree the conference Call for Papers, which should be posted as soon as possible thereafter, normally by the end of November in the year before the conference is to be held. The CFP should specify closing dates for submissions, and the target dates for notification of acceptance.
An example timetable is given in the Appendix to this document.
Each DRH conference is expected to be self funding, with the host
institution bearing responsibility for any deficit, and taking any
profits accruing.
A provisional budget should be included in the bid to host a conference, indicating the expected overall cost, and how this will be recovered from delegate fees, sponsorship, institutional contributions etc.
Delegate fees should be calculated on a cost-recovery basis. Optional extras such as social events, banquets, receptions etc. should either be separately charged or paid for out of conference sponsorship.
Delegate fees should be calculated in such a way as to encourage
residence and participation for the whole of the event rather than to
facilitate daily or non-residential rates.
Where possible, sponsoring organizations should encourage the widest participation in the conference by offering bursaries for free or reduced-rate registration to their constituencies. Definition and promotion of such bursary schemes is the responsibility of the Standing Committee.
In principle, free registration should be offered only to a small number of invited plenary speakers, as approved by the Programme Committee. The Local Organizer may elect to offer a small number of free registrations to local personnel. Members of the Standing Committee should normally pay their own costs, including any registration fees.
The Local Organizer in conjunction with the Programme Committee should actively seek sponsorship of the conference from interested commercial and infrastructural organization. Such sponsorship may be used to defray entertainment at the conference, production of conference publications, or to provide bursaries for delegates as suggested above. All such sponsorship must be explicitly acknowledged in conference publicity and publications.
A closing budget showing actual expenditure and income should be made available in confidence to the Standing Committee within six months of the end of a conference.
For each conference, there will be at least three forms of
publication: a pre-conference Book of Abstracts, a web site,
and a post-conference edited highlights volume.
The Local Organizer is responsible for the production in print form of a book of abstracts to be distributed to all delegates as part of the conference registration. The Organizer is also responsible for provision of pre-conference information in electronic form on a website linked to the main DRH website at http://www.drh.org ; this pre-conference information need not include the full text of abstracts, but should include the provisional programme and should be regularly updated during the immediate pre-conference period.
To optimize preparation of these pre-conference materials, the Local Organizer is recommended to include guidelines about acceptable formats for submissions in the CFP.
A selection of papers from each conference should be made for formal publication, normally under the editorship of the Programme Chair and the Local Organiser, plus any additional persons they may wish to invite, and normally with the OHC, though a particular Local Organizer may choose another publisher, with the approval of a two-thirds majority of the PC.
If a greater number of papers of publishable quality are received than can be accommodated in the volume of Selected Papers, the Editors should actively seek to arrange for their publication in appropriate journals, such as
From the point of view of an institution hosting DRH in year NN, a typical timetable might be as follows:
The Programme Committee should decide on the relative numbers of plenary and parallel sessions, and the maximum number of parallel strands; the latter should neither be so large as to make the conference incoherent, nor so small as to make the conference boring. In general, quality should be preferred to quantity, and variety to monotony.
In the DRH context, a poster is a paper presented in
poster format rather than as an oral presentation.
Work not considered suitable for oral presentation may be considered for presentation as a poster, or posters may be explicitly requested in the CFP.
If a posters are solicited, the conference programme must include at least one timetabled plenary poster session during which all poster presenters can expect to be able to discuss their work with conference delegates.
Poster presentations should be included in the official conference proceedings and should be reviewed in the same way as papers intended for oral presentation.
Poster presenters should be given clear information about the amount of space available for displaying their posters and allocated a specific board.
In the DRH context, a workshop is a training event,
lasting at least two hours, typically focussing on some particular
skill or technology of relevance to the themes of the
conference. Where such workshops are organized in conjunction with a
DRH conference, the following recommendations may be helpful:
DRH is an important showcase for electronic publishers, academic projects, and even software developers. A permanent exhibit space is desirable throughout the course of the conference; it is highly desirable that this should be physically close to the main conference events, and that all delegates should be encouraged to visit it.
The Local Organizer (with assistance from the Standing Committee) should solicit potential exhibitors with a view to selecting those of maximum relevance to the themes of the conference
Exhibitors may be charged pro rata for exhibition space.
At the discretion of the local organizer, exhibitors may be entitled to reduced registration for the academic part of the conference.
The Programme Committee should conduct a careful academic
review of all proposals submitted for DRH. The review should be
carried out according to an agreed