0.8 A grand challenge for the humanities and social sciences  (Page 2/2)

Were such an infrastructure available, scholars would not be the only beneficiaries: everyone online couldexplore connections within a cultural record that is now scattered across libraries, archives, museums, galleries, and privatecollections around the world, under varying conditions of stability and accessibility. A better understanding of ourselves, our world,and our past would result, as well as a richer framework for learning and scholarship.

In spite of high-profile efforts such as Google Book Search,

Creating such an infrastructure is a grand challenge for the humanities and social sciences, and indeed forthe academy, the nation, and the world, because a digitized cultural heritage is not limited by or contained withindisciplinary boundaries, individual institutions, or national borders. The resources that make up our cultural record are oftenfound far from the site of their creation and use, carried off as spoils of war, relocated to museum exhibitions or storage, orhidden away in private collections. We now have an opportunity to create an integrated digital representation of the cultural record,connecting its disparate parts and making the resulting whole more available to one and all, over the network.

Creating this integrated, networked cultural record will require intensive collaboration among scholars as wellas cooperation with librarians, curators, and archivists; the involvement of experts in the sciences, law, business, andentertainment; and active participation from and endorsement by the general public. Enabling anything like seamless access to thecultural record will require developing tools to navigate among vast catalogs of born-digital and digitized materials, as well asthe records of physical materials: it will also require addressing daunting problems in digital preservation, copyright, and economicsustainability. The return on this investment will be a humanities and socialscience cyberinfrastructure that will allow new questions to be asked, new patterns and relations to be discerned,and deep structures in language, society, and culture to be exposed and explored.

Librarians, curators, archivists, and the private sector are already joining forces with the objective ofcreating universal access to knowledge anywhere and everywhere. The Open Content Alliance has shown that commercial, nonprofit, anduniversity content creators can cooperate in powerful ways to increase open access to cultural resources. Google has as itsstated mission “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”—albeit not on open-access terms.From a technical perspective, Google Book Search has shown that we can digitize collections of millions of books, although it needs tobe acknowledged that even those millions of books constitute only a tiny fraction of the cultural record that exists in archives,museums of all types, and rare book collections as well as, of course, in music, visual arts, maps, photography, movies, radio,television, video games, and other forms of new media.

Librarians speak increasingly today of building the “global digital library,” while museum curators talkof “heading toward a kind of digital global museum”; archivists have been experimenting with virtual finding aids that provideunified online access to records that are physically dispersed.

As the Internet becomes home to more of our cultural heritage, the issues of access, management, andpreservation become ever more critical. In their study “How Much Information,” Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian have tracked thesteadily increasing amounts of information produced each year, in all media. In 2003, analyzing chiefly 2002 data, they estimatedproduction of 300 terabytes (TB) of print, 25TB of movies, 375,000TB of digital photography, 987TB of radio, 8,000TB oftelevision, 58TB of audio CDs—and their estimates do not include software (such as video games) or materials originally produced forthe Web, or more ephemeral forms of digital information such as phone calls or instant messaging.

The challenge is indeed grand in scale; hence, now is the time for ambitious thinking about what advances ininformation technology and communications networks have to offer the humanities and social sciences, and, in turn, and how suchadvances can ultimately serve the public.