The Global Performing Arts Database (GloPAD) is an on-line, multilingual database of digital objects and their descriptive data related to the theatre arts worldwide. The current database and its two interfaces (administrative and public) were built through an IMLS-funded project that ran from 2002 to 2006. GloPAD continues to develop, currently through a NEH-funded project to develop the Japanese Performing Arts Resource Center (JPARC), a proof-of-concept project to build on-line, community-based, resource centers for performing arts scholarship using objects and information from GloPAD.

This talk will discuss the history and development of this project, including how we have tried to handle metadata for event-oriented resources, multilingual vocabularies, and the workflows of distributed and collaborative metadata archiving. While the original goal of the GloPAD project was simply to allow access to materials in dispersed, remote collections, it has never fit the simple model of digitizing a collection. Multilingual metadata and the complexities of performing arts documentary histories have made the distributed production of this database both rich and problematic. In the very process of setting up an infrastructure to bring together materials and information, the assumptions about what those resources are have had to be negotiated. What are the practical limits to the analysis and reuse of objects now that we are exfoliating existing archives with digital technologies and new metadata frameworks? GloPAD has become, like many other on-line resources today, a growing site of production and a case study for humanities scholarship in our age of digital technology.

Joshua Young is Project Coordinator and a Research Associate on GloPAC's current JPARC development project. He worked as the Administrative Coordinator and a Research Associate of the IMLS GloPAD project from 2003. Joshua has a PhD in Japanese literature with a specialty in the early-modern urban theatre forms and their intersection with literature and historical studies. His interests focus primarily on integrating media studies and technology with the practice of historical scholarship, in particular with scholarship on historical performance traditions.