<x-tad-bigger>It is also noteworthy, but not necessarily significant, that there are Museum leaders among the Commission members and Advisors; </x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger>Len: Did you mean to say that there are NO museum leaders.... as I can't see any on the list. I don't think one should necessarily have expected any, although it would have been prescient of them to have included one cross-over - an academic, a scholar who was active in museums (as Bill Barnett would appear to be).
</x-tad-bigger>
Commission Members:
Paul Courant
Provost and Professor of Economics
University of Michigan
Sarah Fraser
Associate Professor and Chair
Art History, Northwestern University
Mike Goodchild
Director, Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science Professor, Geography
University of California, Santa Barbara
Margaret Hedstrom
Associate Professor, School of Information
University of Michigan
Charles Henry
Vice President and Chief Information Officer
Rice University
Peter B. Kaufman
Director of Strategic Initiatives, Innodata Isogen
President, Intelligent Television
Jerome McGann
John Stewart Bryan Professor
English, University of Virginia
Roy Rosenzweig
Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor
History, George Mason University
John Unsworth (Chair)
Dean and Professor
Grad School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Bruce Zuckerman
Professor, School of Religion
Director, Archaeological Research Collection
University of Southern California
Advisors to the Commission:
Dan Atkins
Professor, School of Information
Director, Alliance for Community Technology
University of Michigan
James Herbert
Senior NSF/NEH Advisor
National Science Foundation
Clifford Lynch, Director
Coalition for Networked Information
Deanna Marcum
Associate Librarian for Library Services
Library of Congress
Harold Short
Director, Center for Computing in the Humanities
King's College, London
Donald J. Waters
Program Officer for Scholarly Communication
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Steve Wheatley
Vice-President, American Council of Learned Societies
Senior Editor:
Abby Smith
Director of Programs
Council on Library and Information Resources
Washington, DC
David
On Jun 16, 2004, at 1:49 PM, Leonard Steinbach wrote:
<x-tad-bigger>David,</x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger> </x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger>Thank you for raising promulgating this... I was (truly) about to do so myself.</x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger> </x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger>I will be attending the Commission meeting in New York on Saturday, but not ostensibly to testify. I am looking forward to seeing how Museums are portrayed, and as you noted, the Chicago notes are not posted yet, so your summation is most helpful.</x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger> </x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger>It may be (again, I was awaiting my experience on Saturday to decide my view) that both AAM and MCN should provide more formal representational testimony to the Commission, both as written documents and verbal testimony.</x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger> </x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger>It is also noteworthy, but not necessarily significant, that there are Museum leaders among the Commission members and Advisors; however, given the sponsorship of the Mellon foundation, it seems hardly likely that museums will be forgotten on all this.</x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger> </x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger>I will just reiterate that the website for this project is </x-tad-bigger><x-tad-bigger> and one can find more information there, including meeting notes, and sign up there for email notifications about its progress.</x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger> </x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger>I am glad you have stimulated this discussion.</x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger> </x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger>Len Steinbach</x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger> </x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger> </x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger>-----Original Message-----</x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger>From:</x-tad-bigger><x-tad-bigger> David Green [mailto:red...@mac.com]</x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger> </x-tad-bigger><x-tad-bigger>Sent:</x-tad-bigger><x-tad-bigger> Wednesday, June 16, 2004 10:28 AM</x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger>To:</x-tad-bigger><x-tad-bigger> mcn_mc...@listserver.americaneagle.com</x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger>Subject:</x-tad-bigger><x-tad-bigger> Museums and Humanities Cyberinfrastructure</x-tad-bigger>
Readers might be interested in the progress of the Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) <http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber.htm>.
The Commission is a humanities response to the influential NSF Commission on Cyberinfrastructure that made recommendations for improving national cyberinfrastructure for scientific research and teaching ( See "Revolutioning Science & Engineering Through Cyber-infrastructure," <http://www.communitytechnology.org/nsf_ci_report/>).
The ACLS has been holding a series of public meetings (so far in DC and Chicago). The next is this coming Saturday (June 19) at the NY Public Library from 10 to 4:30pm (future public meetings are scheduled for Berkeley, Los Angeles, Houston and Baltimore - see the whole list at <http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber_public_sessions.htm>).
The Commission doesn't seem to know quite where museums might fit into this structure and into the discussion of the infrastructure needs of the country in order to serve the public, teachers and researchers in building significant knowledge and cultural resources online.
However two of the presentations in Chicago went a long way, in my opinion, in laying out the situation of museums. These presentations were by William Barnett at the Field Museum and James Grossman at the Newberry Library. Barnett's presentation was explicitly about the situation of museums (and I quote much of it below). One of the interesting points of Grossman's talk was his emphasis on broadening the audience away from research libraries to a wider public and to opening discussion around the importance of establishing regional centers for cross-sector training and the "digital sharing and communication of knowledge and resources.")
The notes on the Chicago meeting are not yet complete - but I recommend them to you all and I suggest that more from the museum community attend the public hearings in order to ensure the expansion of this discussion. (To ensure you get announcements of future meetings, you can join an announce-list described on the Humanities Cyberinfrastructure homepage: <http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber.htm>.)
Here is part of Barnett's talk:
The current state of our cyberinfrastructure is one of great potential with little to no support. Museums contain vast and unique collections that are valuable as primary source material and as publications. The Field Museum has over 40 active social science researchers on staff. As it relates just to Humanities and Social Sciences, we steward over 600,000 objects in Anthropology, 275,000 volumes in our research library, 500,000 photographs, and 2,500 linear feet of documents in our institutional archives. As a single example, we maintain an important collection of documents and images from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition that not only gave birth to our institution, but also gave rise to 20th Century research and public awareness in Anthropology and Conservation.
Our collections are just a small piece of the great and actively used trove found in Art, Historical, Natural History, Maritime, and other museums that are a primary and growing foundation of scholarly research. Yet, we must continue to generate, curate, and preserve our collections and scholarly information. Could we just unlock the content, it would change the way we undertake research and education worldwide. Initiatives such as ARTstor are first steps that show the potential of museum collections.
Museums' information infrastructures have been under funded. We are second class citizens across a digital scholarly divide. Historically, museums have lagged behind in information technologies. We have frankly been slow to adopt technology infrastructures but at the same time we now find increasing expectations for it and our scholarly success and operational survival depend on it. We do not have the computer science or engineering departments present in universities and so do not have that expertise readily at hand.
We desperately need to catch up in order to participate equitably. Museums were written out of the e-Rate legislation that so assisted libraries and schools. Museums were not part of the community that invested in and profited from Internet2 and [the National Science Foundation's] Digital Library Initiatives, placing us at great disadvantage in terms of the infrastructure and expertise needed to be a vital part of the scholarly community. There are currently 206 University members of Internet2 and 41 Affiliate members, of which one is a museum.
The cyberinfrastructure that will allow us to cross the threshold to new scholarly knowledge environments in teaching and research is at several levels.
First, all our institutions need broadband connections to the Internet and Next Generation Internets and upgrades of our internal networks as a foundation for all other activities. Without this foundation, we cannot take any next steps.
Second, we need investments in data architecture and information management to assist us in developing sustainable models for managing and providing access to our collections information. Museums contain unique information resources that are used broadly by many constituencies. We have found that structures built for other scholarly purposes do not work for our collections or serve these broad and rapidly changing constituencies. Simply data sharing among museum collections and across other data sets has the opportunity to revolutionize our ability to ask and answer questions.
Third, we need to participate in the development of new applications such as digital libraries, collaboratories, and grid computing. The potential contributions of a real cyberinfrastructure are to provide rich and much needed content to the research community to enable learning and teaching by museum and other scholars. Dynamic collaboration is a powerful enabler of new scholarship and museum scholars and collections should be a part of that process. New applications would also provide venues for public enlightenment that create relevancy for the American public, support for formal education, and inspire the next generation of scholars.
I gratefully acknowledge the leadership role organizations like the IMLS and CNI have played in beginning to build bridges amongst a wide range of organizations. It has helped lay the groundwork for next steps in a humanities and social sciences cyberinfrastructure. In order for free-standing museums to play a vital role, we need resources to:
* enhance our physical infrastructure
* produce digital content
* develop information architectures and management strategies
* engage in partnerships with the universities, libraries, the broadcast industry, public schools, local communities, and others
* explore new applications that can revolutionize how we undertake the enterprise of scholarly research
* train our staffs to effectively utilize these technologies
* develop and test measures of success
* change internal reward structures so our scholars will be good partners
Thank you for taking the time to listen to me.
______________________
David Green, Ph.D.
davidgr...@knowledgeculture.com
red...@mac.com
203.334.6094
203.520.9155 (cell)
170 Brooklawn Terrace
Fairfield, CT 06825
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