Nancy Ide has a long history of involvement in the development and distribution of language resources and my activities in the field over the past nearly 40 years. She served as president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities from 1985-95 and in 1987 co-founded the Text Encoding Initiative, in which she was centrally involved for the following decade.

From 1996-2005 she was co-editor-in-chief of the journal Computers and the Humanities (Chum), and since 2005 she has served as co-editor-in-chief (with Nicoletta Calzolari) of the Language Resources and Evaluation (LRE) journal, which is closely connected to ELRA. She has also attended (and served as scientific committee member) for every edition of the ELRA-sponsored Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC).

In the 1990's, she was one of the project managers of the European MULTEXT and MULTEXT-EAST projects, which at the time were the first major efforts to develop high-quality multi-lingual language resources. In connection with those projects she was the principle developer of the Corpus Encoding Standard, and later was a central figure in the establishment of the ISO committee on Language Resource Management and co-developed the ISO Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF). She was the principle investigator for the American National Corpus (ANC) project and its spin-off, the Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus (MASC.

In 2007, she founded the ACL Special Interest Group for Annotation (SIGANN) and the SIGANN-sponsored Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW). Recently, she's been involved in the development of the Language Applications (LAPPS) Grid, which enables easy-to-use, seamless development of workflows comprised of user-selected interoperable HLT modules.