0.21 Recommendations  (Page 4/11)

Universities and those who fund them (privately or publicly) need to reallocate resources to supportdigital cultural activities and develop new financial models for making those activities sustainable. For-profit companies that workwith digital cultural heritage materials or publish humanities and social-science research need to address long-term preservation andaccess issues.

Nearly every discussion in the course of the Commission’s investigations emphasized the urgent need for newfunding and new models of financial sustainability to fund certain core areas, such as preservation and curation of culturalmaterials, innovative research in the humanities and social sciences, electronic publication, and development of tools andresources for classroom use. Recent partnership agreements between research university libraries and Google represent one model offinancial sustainability, although some question the long-term harmony of interests and missions in these partnerships. Even ifsuch questions persist, continued experimentation with new forms of cooperation between the private sector and cultural institutionsremains of utmost importance. Commercial and nonprofit partnerships are possible, and commercial investment has often benefitedscholarship and the dissemination of cultural heritage content in North America.

Still, there will always be scholarship, teaching, and research that can be conducted only with publicsubsidy, either directly from the government or from tax-exempt private philanthropy. Government funding agencies, most notably theNational Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), should continue their supportof digital projects, including digital tools and other elements of the cyberinfrastructure. We believe that increased support from theNational Science Foundation (NSF) for work in the digital humanities will benefit both the humanities and computer science.The recent joint initiative of the NEH, NSF, and Smithsonian Institution to fund the documentation of endangered languagesdemonstrates that such a partnership can succeed.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a both a leader in and a leading funder of the application of digitaltechnologies to the humanities and social sciences. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Packard Institute for the Humanities,the Rockefeller Foundation, and others have also provided support to critical initiatives. While many other private funding agencieshave supported digital projects, these efforts have not so far been coordinated purposefully to achieve the kind of cyberinfrastructureenvisioned in this report.