0.1 Sustainability: the elephant in the room  (Page 12/12)

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance, grew the iceberg, too.

When we pursue sustainability and try to forge policy, we want to remember: that is the horizon we’re working in.

“How depressing,” some might say. “Not at all,” I answer. “The poet was quite right. And so was another poet who said this: “In play, there are two pleasures for your choosing,/ The one is winning, and the other losing.” They were right because both knew that “if a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.” And we’re all here looking for a Better Way.

JPL is still going strong, despite its disasters, and after the Titanic global travel is commonplace. Another of my favorite and darkly comic poets was also right when he urged us to “Say not the struggle nought availeth.” We’re on “The Long E volution.” And because we are, we want to travel in the company of those a more recent poet called “The Less Deceived.” Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again on a sustained basis, on the library shelves and also online, is—as they say about old age—“not for sissies.” It will be done even though none of us here knows exactly how. I also think—I hope—that all of us, even the youngest, will not live to say, as a careless and ignorant man once foolishly said, “Mission Accomplished.” Much better would be to ask ourselves what Sean Connery asked Kevin Costner in The Untouchables : “What are you prepared to do ?”

Which brings me back to my initial subject, Sustainability. We have to sustain our traditional cultural records. We also have to sustain our growing body of born-digital scholarship. And we have to develop and sustain digital mechanisms that give scholars functional access to both.

But there we have only the “what” of the problem. Defining it as a practical problem shifts us to ask “how.” And when we make the shift we realize, like Kathy Acker’s heroine, that the question ultimately comes down to “who.” We know that a number of institutional agents have a serious interest in these issues. Thinking today in relation to that nexus, I’ve deliberately assumed the position of the scholar in order to examine sustainability (1) from the point of view of scholars as they function in their traditional institutional settings, digital and non-digital; and (2) from the point of view of scholars as they work and collaborate with non-academic persons and institutions.

I’ve done this partly out of necessity, because those are the perspectives in which I experience the issues. But I’ve also done it to argue that the scholar’s interests ought to be determining ones—perhaps, if there is such a thing, the determining ones. Why is that? Because it is the scholar’s vocation to monitor the cultural record as the indispensable resource for public education. As librarians, publishers, funding agencies, and academic administrators engage these issues from their special vantage points, they should keep that perspective—my perspective, our perspective—clearly before their minds.

The most disturbing aspect of the ongoing Google Book Settlement dispute is that the interests of the higher educational community have not been represented in the negotiations. But the dismal truth is that we have been absent for years from many decisive, if less dramatic, events. We are largely invisible. Because only a small minority of scholars has been active with digital work and the institutional changes it is bringing, they function on their own—as individuals or relatively small groups, isolated within their own traditional communities. This is the social fracture in the world of higher education exposing the very heart of the matter.

Or the heart failure. “We will advance funeral by funeral,” a learned digital scholar once mordantly remarked when I was kvetching with him on these subjects. And while I’m sure he touched an important truth, it isn’t a truth to help us shape reliable policy, which is what we need. Sustaining digital scholarship means sustaining our cultural resources tout court , digital and non-digital, and it also means taking a long view. It is a social problem pressing on the entire community entrusted with the care of public education. Advertising, ideology, propaganda, and entertainment are part of our public education, but scholarship is its source and end and test. And sustainability is what scholarship has always been about.

“What are you prepared to do ?”