Humanities and Arts on the Information Highways:
A Profile
Introduction
The NII is at the center of an American information revolution that will
profoundly affect the ways in which we communicate, learn, work, and govern
ourselves. The nature of a democratic society requires an educated, and
informed, citizenry. Information is not only a keystone of democracy but also
one of the nation's most critical economic resources. Information is an
educational, research, and creative asset accumulated by past generations,
invested for the future. Electronic technologies have the potential to
transform information from a scarce, inequitably distributed and fragmented
commodity into a true public good, one that is virtually inexhaustible as well
as perpetually renewed and expanded.
Humanities and arts computing has significant contributions to make, not only
to the content of the NII, but also to advances in technology that will drive
its development. The technological research and investment required to bring
the complex resources of the humanities and arts into digital form and to make
them accessible would contribute profoundly to the most difficult technological
challenges of our age: machine understanding, machine vision and natural
language processing. The creation of a fully interactive and exploratory
environment essential for the arts and humanities to thrive would transform the
NII from a link between computers to a connection between people.
Undercapitalization of the impressive array of exciting projects already
underway, and technological barriers that require concerted research, are
impairing the ability of these communities to meet the challenges and realize
fully their contribution to the dawning electronic age. A national policy that
encourages humanities and arts endeavors will allow for cultural heritage
information to contribute toward the promises of the NII and enable the
scientific and engineering communities to reap the benefits of research on
humanities-driven technology problems.
Reshaping humanities and arts information for distribution over electronic
networks can provide many dividends, among them the following:
- Enriching a sense of community through active participation in a networked
environment.
- Improving the quality of teaching, and the learning of critical thinking,
visual literacy, and analytical skills.
- Fostering intellectual and artistic collaborations that will result in new
resources in the arts and humanities.
- Preserving the full complexities and quality of cultural information for the
use of future generations while making it accessible to more people today.
If the NII were to offer access to everything found in the nation's libraries,
museums, theaters, auditoriums, and archives, it could help dissolve the
boundaries that now separate communities, social classes, people of different
economic levels, the highly educated and the broad public, and the peoples of
different nations. Networks and new multimedia formats for information can
reverse current inequities in access to resources. Some resources that broaden
such access already exist, such as these:
- The Global Jukebox, a multimedia database that provides audio, video
and textual information on international music, dance and cultural traditions
across time and geography. The Global Jukebox, funded by the National Science
Foundation (NSF), among others, provides a research and teaching resource for
anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, dance and theater historians, and
sociologists as well as for choreographers, composers and other creative
artists.
- Save Outdoor Sculpture (SOS), a national inventory effort to catalog
outdoor works of public art, jointly sponsored by the National Museum of
American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Institute for the
Conservation of Cultural Property.
- The Making of America: 1860-1960, a project initiated by Cornell
University to preserve a significant record of our national heritage as digital
images and to make those materials available on the Internet.
- Variations, a project at Indiana University's Music Library, that
provides an online listing of music resources worldwide, and also serves as a
testbed for the application of emerging technology to the distribution of
digital audio and full-motion video across networks.
- The Perseus project, which brings the world of Greek classical
antiquity to the public's fingertips through images, literary texts, historic
documents and maps, published on interactive compact disc (CD-ROM) and
videodisc by Yale University Press.
Electronic networks are unparalleled teaching tools, making research findings,
educational materials and original sources available to any teacher and any
student. Examples of just a few of the projects currently online and in
development demonstrate this potential:
- The National Geographic Society's Kids Network provides students in
grades 4 through 6 an opportunity to participate in a telecommunications-based
science and geography curriculum where they can investigate new ideas and
exchange information with students around the world. This network allows
students in all 50 states and 38 countries to collect information and draw
conclusions from data exchanged electronically.
- Direction Paris and Dans le Quartier St. Gervais, housed the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory in the Humanities in the
Department of Humanities and the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives,
are multimedia interactive language teaching programs.
- The American Founding Fathers Project and the Packard Humanities
Institute are digitizing the unedited manuscripts of Franklin, Adams,
Washington, Madison and Jefferson to produce a CD-ROM that will be distributed
to public libraries.
- The Cleopatra Project, being developed by the Art Institute of Chicago
on CD-ROM, will relate objects through an information matrix and
high-resolution images. This multidimensional teaching resource will have the
capacity to view multiple sides and details of objects and connect the works to
related illustrations of maps, photographs and other illustrations.
Networks can facilitate artistic or scholarly collaboration, lowering the
barriers posed by geography and specialization. Some examples are interactive
fiction writing done in Storyspace, or the collaborative forum for poets
provided by Poet-L. The electronic highway has created new "virtual"
public spaces, such as the bulletin board dialogues that PacerForum
makes possible, where communication, debate, exhibitions and other novel forms
of electronic interaction occur.
Interpretation, discovery and experimentation in the arts and humanities can be
enormously quickened and expanded by electronic networks. Conference papers,
for example, become accessible immediately, instead of many months after the
event. Publishers already use the Internet to circulate electronic catalogs of
new titles. University presses have begun experimenting with the electronic
distribution of scholarly journals, and trade publishers are investigating the
custom-tailoring of classroom texts for specific audiences. Examples of
specific projects in this area are the following:
- H-NET, an international initiative, is a collection of lists of
affinity groups (listservs) specifically for historians that is operated on a
voluntary basis by scholars in the United States, Canada, Australia and Italy.
With the financial support of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH),
and hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago, H-NET sponsors 37
electronic scholarly discussion groups with a rapidly expanding list of more
than 10,000 subscribers who communicate research, teaching methods, analytical
approaches and shared interests. Each list features topical dialogues, and
publishes book reviews, job announcements, syllabi, bibliographies, guides to
online library catalogs and archives, and reports on new software, data sets
and CD-ROMs.
- Pre-press networks in philosophy, economics, communications and philology
provide early access to scholarly conference papers.
- Humanist is the longest-running listserv for humanities scholars,
while Arts Wire offers a range of services to artists and arts
organizations.
- TULIP, an acronym for The University Licensing Project, is a
three-year project being conducted by Elsevier Science Publishers and nine
university library systems. It provides online versions of all project titles
and a total of 42 serial titles to review. The information in this project
will be used to answer technical, service and marketing questions relating to
the creation, delivery and use of current, core science journals in online
form.
Projects such as the MicroGallery of the National Gallery (London), distributed
on CD-ROM, demonstrate that the entire holdings of museums and archives -- not
merely what can be displayed at any one moment -- could be available as both
visual and text catalogs. In addition, records referring to works, artifacts
and texts now physically scattered in separate collections can be brought
together in electronic databases, as is being done in the following projects:
- The Leonard Bernstein Archives Project, undertaken by the Library of
Congress, a consortium of institutions across the country, and the Leonard
Bernstein estate, to digitize electronic facsimiles of letters, scores, books
and audio recordings that constitute the archive of this composer, musician and
educator.
- The Census of Antique Art and Architecture Known to the Renaissance,
an electronic archive that reconstitutes Renaissance sketchbooks, texts and
drawings dispersed in museums and libraries around the world.
- The Global Jewish Database, an online database containing a collection
of material for scholars of Jewish history and culture.
- The Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML), an evolving database,
centered at Indiana University-Bloomington, that will eventually contain the
entire corpus of Latin music theory written during the Middle Ages and the
early Renaissance.
- The Provenance Documentation Collaborative, a consortium that has
amassed inventories and sales records of works of art from European archives
and auction catalogs.
These projects, and the many others like them, form the building blocks of
national data sets in the humanities and arts (see pp. 16, 36). What is
missing is the greater cooperation, both national and international, needed to
avoid duplication of effort and to ensure that resources can be adapted to
global networks. Such coordination stands to improve not only the
understanding of American culture in foreign countries, but also Americans'
appreciation of their own cultural heritages.
Attention to the automation of these resources into national data sets could
open new markets for America's cultural wealth. The United States holds
masterpieces from many civilizations and societies as well as the unique riches
of Native American artifacts. The worldwide market for cultural heritage
information is, on balance, a trade asset to the U.S. Networked information
also generates a positive synergy; the more people have access to it, the more
people will use it and find new uses for it, thus attracting more users. In
addition, stimulated demand will lower costs.
Humanities and arts computing also has a unique contribution to make to the
technical achievements of the NII. The technical challenges posed by
assembling cultural heritage information in electronic form will offer
complexities of a different order from the sciences.
If the potential benefits of the information revolution are to be realized, the
humanities and the arts will need to make vital contributions. At the moment,
financial under-capitalization, technological underdevelopment, and political
neglect combine to hinder their doing so. The sections that follow describe
the specific steps that must be taken if the humanities and arts are to occupy
their rightful place on the information highway.
The NII Agenda for Action identified the following five basic components of a
national information infrastructure (NII Agenda for Action, September 15, 1993,
p. 5):
-
The physical facilities used to transmit, process, display and store
data (voice, text, images).
- The information itself, in the form of scientific, scholarly or
business databases, video programming, images, sound recordings, library
archives and other media.
- The software programs (also known as applications) that allows
users to access, manipulate, organize and digest proliferating masses of
information.
- The network standards and transmission codes that allow networks to
connect with each other, and that also ensure reliability, user privacy and the
security of information.
-
The people who create the information, develop applications and
services, construct facilities and train others.
These components, or requirements, apply to all participants in the information
infrastructure, whether in the sciences or the arts and humanities, whether in
manufacturing, health care or electronic commerce. The section that follows
assesses the current progress made by humanities and arts computing in these
five areas (making allowances for the great disparities that currently exist
among institutions, disciplines and individuals in these fields).
Physical Facilities
University- and college-based programs in the humanities and arts have invested
substantially in acquiring and installing all kinds of computer equipment.
Faculty offices usually have a desktop workstation as virtually standard
equipment (though not necessarily connected to the Internet); students
typically have access to computer labs and computerized library catalogs,
perhaps from their dormitory rooms. Together, these university-based
investments in equipment have laid a basic, if low-powered, foundation of
facilities for an information infrastructure serving the humanities and the
arts.
Nevertheless, the promise of universal access is far from a reality. While the
investment in physical facilities has been significant, many inequities exist,
both between campuses and within any given campus. These gaps are likely to
continue, if not worsen, as technological improvements in the quality and
multimedia capabilities of equipment make access to more than basic facilities
necessary. Now, as technological advances improve capacity, expand
applications and link computers to other forms of communication, universities
and colleges will need to continue to upgrade their physical facilities.
Indeed, the acquisition, maintenance and upgrading of physical computing
facilities will be particularly crucial for the arts and humanities, where the
complex form of such information requires sophisticated equipment and technical
improvements in visual, audio and text representation.
In addition, what has been missing until very recently is the consciousness of
the paramount importance of interconnectivity: each college, university and
university system has proceeded independently in acquiring its computer
facilities and equipment, which were operated primarily on a stand-alone basis.
Now, in the age of networks, institutions of higher education face a set of
"last mile" or even "last foot" interconnectivity problems: that is, while a
campus, or a library, or a single department may have the necessary equipment
or network connection, not all faculty, administrators or students will
necessarily have full access to these resources. In an era of constrained
budgets, many institutions of higher education will be hard pressed to find the
financial resources to meet these evolving needs.
Cultural institutions outside higher education often lack the most basic
computer facilities. By contrast, university-affiliated museums, libraries,
arts centers, and archives can take advantage of their institution's
investments in information facilities and access to networks. For example,
according to the Museum Computer Network (MCN), it is not uncommon for museums
to regard non-administrative computing facilities as unnecessary unless funded
by outside grants or required to meet a specific project or legal need. As a
consequence, many museums have not established institutional computing
facilities (SPECTRA, Vol. 21, No. 4). While exhibition planners could use
interactive multimedia tools to reach and engage more museum visitors, and
provide better resource materials for scholarship and classroom use, the
necessary equipment is likely to be beyond the means of most such
institutions.
Even for fully automated cultural institutions, interconnection to the Internet
may be unavailable or costly if acquired through commercial service providers.
Indeed, such large museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National
Gallery of Art in Washington have no access to Internet services on a
gallery-wide basis (SPECTRA, Vol. 21, No. 4). This situation is probably true
of virtually all of the 15,000 museums, historical societies and archives in
the United States as well.
The same deficiencies characterize many local arts and performing arts
organizations, relatively few of which are fully computerized, and some of
which lack even basic computer equipment. Communication networks in the arts
are still uncommon, though participation in services such as Arts Wire have
risen dramatically in the past few years. Certainly many artists, particularly
those who are not institutionally affiliated, do not own or have access to
networked personal computers, and are thus excluded from a medium that they
might find has intense creative potential for them.
Information
While electronic networks are certainly communication-rich, at present they are
relatively content-poor, especially for researchers in the humanities and arts:
an enormous amount of work remains to be done to convert the riches of our arts
and cultural heritage information to electronic form. Without a critical mass
of information, technological capacity is a hollow structure, like a library
without books.
In the sciences, the newest information is the most valuable; historical
information plays a distinctly secondary role to current documentation. In the
arts and humanities, ancient archival materials are as valuable as modern.
Materials accumulated over centuries -- manuscripts, texts, plays, maps, dance
notation, sound and video recordings, drawings, paintings, sculpture, and
artifacts of all kinds, as well as catalogs of all these materials -- are
awaiting transformation into digital form. Such conversions will be enormously
costly, because they must be undertaken at the highest possible quality levels
so that the expense of successive re-digitizing can be avoided as technology
improves.
The Brittle Books initiative of the National Endowment for the
Humanities aims to preserve and improve access to 3 million brittle books
through a nationwide effort over the next 20 years. The value to scholars and
others of such improved access would be even further enhanced were the content
of this significant corpus made available across the global Internet. Other
projects aiming to increase access to humanities and arts resources include
bibliographic, indexing, and object registration databases of long standing,
which have been online for several years, such as the MLA Bibliography,
the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, and the National Museum of
American Art's Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture. Still
others, such as the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and the
Library of Congress' National Coordinated Cataloging Operation (NACO),
standardize the vocabulary prevalent in humanities and arts information. If
such standards efforts were extended and adequately funded, they could become
the building blocks for national cultural heritage databases. They would
provide the integrating terminology needed to enable hundreds of individual and
institutional projects to combine in a fully accessible digital resource of
popular interest and educational value.
While the list of such projects is long and varied -- with generous support
from NEH and NEA manifest in many cases -- it is still a cacophony of
individual efforts, unguided by any systematic plan. What is needed are the
vision and the funds to convert these separate projects into broadly based
national data sets in the humanities and arts. A few model projects that have
established a coordinated data collection process include the following:
-
Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).
Hosted at the University of Michigan, the ICPSR is supported by funds from the
NSF and by over 300 American and Canadian universities as well as national
memberships in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere. It maintains an archive
of more than 30,000 data sets in the social sciences derived from surveys,
censuses and administrative records. Of these, 1,000 are available over the
Internet, and others will be added as additional disk space and documentation
is prepared.
-
American and French Research in the Treasury on the French Language
(ARTFL), a database containing the French national literary corpus the
Trésor de la Langue Française with works from the 17th to
the 20th century.
It is not that the federal government fails to recognize the value of national
data collection efforts; substantial support is currently provided for the
creation of national data sets in the sciences. In fiscal year 1995, for
example, the federal government plans to spend $152 million on the Human Genome
Project, the creation of a database of our biological heritage, and (including
investment from the private sector) $231 million for the Global Climate Change
and Biological Diversity Documentation initiatives. Over the next decade, the
federal government will commit many billions of dollars to these and other
scientific projects. It is not unreasonable to ask for a similar level of
commitment toward building national data sets recording our cultural
heritage.
Government support for national data sets in other countries might provide
models for similar support in this country. Many cultural databases, such as
The Network of European Reference Corpora (NERC); the Oxford Text
Archive; EuropArt; and the Network of Art Research Computer Image
Systems in Europe (NARCISSE) are being developed in Europe, evidently
because Europeans have come to recognize the research value of cultural
databases and are discovering that their cultural information can have economic
value as well.
Software Applications
Digitizing the centuries of existing humanities and arts information will be a
long, expensive process that will only be worthwhile if it is built with an eye
toward anticipated use and accompanied by software applications and tools that
make possible a new dimension of learning and experience.
Burgeoning numbers of users can, for example, already participate in dialogues
carried on within listservs; circulate journal articles for peer review with
ease; and collaborate on research projects with geographically separated
colleagues. Examples of promising tools include the following:
- Mosaic, a browsing mechanism containing graphics and hypertext links
(developed at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the
University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana), which allows a user to navigate
the Internet with relative ease.
- Textual Analysis Computing Tools (TACT), a collection of programs for
textual analysis which allow scholars to examine their materials in diverse
ways.
At the same time, the field is wide open for the development of new tools
geared to the needs of network users of cultural heritage information. Some
examples of needed new tools include:
- Authoring tools suited to the production and exploration of content in the
humanities and arts.
- Shareable libraries of software tools.
- More sophisticated navigational tools to replace today's rudimentary ones.
Needs in this area are detailed further in the document of the Working Group on
Technical Requirements, in the second section of this report.
Network Standards and Transmission Codes
Standards and transmission codes are the most daunting of all the challenges
the developers of global information networks face. The sheer newness and
immense size of electronic networks means that standards for many different
functions had to be invented nearly overnight, among them encryption for data
security; log-on permission; recordkeeping to permit billing for the use of
copyrighted material; and network management. This will continue to be true of
such standards as data structures, coordinated vocabularies and many more.
Since electronic networks are global communication structures, network
standards are by definition problems of the whole. Although different groups
of organizations (computer firms, utility companies, federal contractors)
assume responsibility for developing discrete parts of the total set of
standards/transmission protocols, all work must be informed by a keen awareness
of what all other groups are doing if the network is to function at all.
Technical committees of the International Organization for Standardization
(ISO) and, in this country, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE) have responsibility for regulating the development of network
standards and transmission codes. Because the approval process is cumbersome,
companies may publish a new standard and begin using it as they wait for it to
make its way through the process. Yet the imperatives of global communication
are so great that no proprietary standard could survive if it ignored the
interconnectivity requirements of the network as a whole.
Another characteristic of network standards and transmission codes is that
standards are in constant evolution as technological advances make new
applications possible. Twenty years ago, as the earliest network protocols were
being fashioned for use on the ARPANET, it was not envisioned that computer
networks would ever be capable of carrying real-time video and that therefore a
new protocol (asynchronous transfer mode, or ATM) based on entirely new
principles would be required for such transmission to occur satisfactorily.
The network standards discussed above are defined as information interchange
standards. Data standards are other criteria which, though not peculiar to the
networked environment, protect the long-term value of the data stored in
electronic databases, and make the transitions from one form of hardware or
software to another easier when technological improvements dictate changes in
equipment.
Standards for the content of our cultural heritage must accommodate the special
characteristics of humanities and arts information manifested in all media of
expression. The global nature of the humanities and arts favors the definition
of open standards arrived at by broad consensus of an international community,
reflected in ongoing efforts such as:
- The Text Encoding Initiative, an international project sponsored by
the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for
Computational Linguistics, and the Association for Literary and Linguistic
Computing with support from the NEH, the University of Illinois at Chicago and
Oxford University, which has created guidelines for Standard Generalized Markup
Language (SGML)-based encoding and interchange of machine-readable texts.
- The Art Information Task Force (AITF), a group representing the
concerns of scholars, museum professionals and information specialists that has
established a comprehensive set of categories for the description of works of
art. Their work has in part been funded by an NEH grant to the College Art
Association.
- The Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information
(CIMI), a not-for-profit and for-profit private sector consortium that is
working with museums and information networks in the Unites States, Canada and
Europe to define application protocols for the interchange of museum data.
CIMI grew out of a NEH-funded project to enable museums to exchange data
between systems.
- The Image and Information Standards Initiative, sponsored by the Getty
Art History Information Program, which is identifying issues in imaging that
require collective solutions and standard approaches. Among these issues are
the vexing problems of developing guidelines for access to intellectual
property and frameworks for project management for the ever-growing universe of
digitization projects.
Many similar large-scale standards development efforts, and much education and
assistance in the implementation of common methods, will be required before
humanities and arts information will be widely available. Nevertheless, it is
only through such content and application standards that the information so
much desired for cultural enrichment can be made available and usable.
People
People create information, develop applications and services, train others to
navigate available data resources, and are the ultimate contributors to and
users of the electronic network. These crucial processes were first begun as
individual scholars, librarians and artists became interested in demonstrating
the potential of networked information to their communities. Now professional
organizations have begun efforts not only to educate their members but also to
represent their interests in policy debates. Professional associations in the
humanities and the arts have an important role to play, by:
- Providing forums for discussing standards and priorities, as well as
identifying items for policy action.
- Disseminating information (e.g., by producing directories), collecting
statistics and evaluating current programs and practices.
- Articulating how improvements in electronic resources would serve the
public.
- Sponsoring research into user behavior and the development of educational
materials.
Just as professional associations have focused the efforts of individuals
wishing to provide leadership in demonstrating the potential of networked
information to their audiences, a center created to coordinate the efforts of a
large number of professional associations could in turn provide an even greater
leveraging effect.
Clearly, training in the use of the information highway will be a persistent
concern. Not only will every American soon need basic training in electronic
literacy, but specialized training and periodic refreshers will be needed as
new resources and technologies appear. One model for such specialized training
and software evaluation is currently provided by the Center for Electronic
Texts in the Humanities (CETH) based at Rutgers and Princeton Universities.
To say that such training will be the joint responsibility of schools and
government, parents and teachers, business and the nonprofit sectors means that
each segment of the economy will undoubtedly pursue its own agenda: employers
will provide training in the hopes of increasing employee productivity;
profit-making firms will educate potential users about the benefits of their
electronic products. Coordination (or at least acknowledgment) of the aims of
the various types of training available will ensure that training in the
humanities and the arts is not neglected because these fields offer less
obvious or immediate economic benefits.
In order to strengthen its arguments for a voice for humanities and arts in the
National Information Infrastructure (NII), sponsors of the National Initiative
distributed a draft of this report to strategic organizations and institutions
in the cultural heritage community. The primary focus of this feedback was a
meeting, on July 14, 1994, at which representatives of more than 40 humanities-
and arts-related organizations assembled to consider the Profile report
(Appendix E). Appendices C-E reflect the immense institutional and individual
expertise brought to bear on these issues by representatives from museums,
libraries and archives, colleges and universities, learned societies,
foundations and government agencies.
The sponsoring organizations and the Executive Committee of the National
Initiative outlined their purposes in convening the National Initiative, and
summarized the reports of the two working groups on Technical Requirements and
Electronic Resources. David Lytel, Information Infrastructure Specialist from
the Executive Office of the President of the United States, was invited to
explain the current planning process for the National Information
Infrastructure. He described the administration's model for the NII, whereby
users will be both creators as well as recipients of information services, a
model conducive to the inclusion of the arts and humanities.
Discussion at the July 14 meeting and subsequent responses from the constituent
communities affirmed that the Profile accurately and succinctly portrayed the
landscape of technology and electronic resources in which the arts and
humanities find themselves today. Important additional observations were made,
including the following:
- The arts and humanities account for a great many jobs; they are important in
economic as well as cultural terms.
- Moving cultural materials into the digital environment poses unusual and
sophisticated intellectual and technical challenges, the solutions to which
will benefit users of the NII in a broad array of other fields and
applications, including commercial ones. Giving full attention to the arts and
humanities in developing the NII will help ensure U.S. leadership in developing
information technology.
- Broad electronic access to the nation's cultural heritage will be vital for
ensuring the accountability of government and the continuing health of
democracy in the United States.
- The digital cultural heritage must include materials from the full panoply of
this nation's and the world's peoples, and include both materials from the past
and works and programs currently being produced by artists, musicians,
scholars, writers and others.
- Arts and humanities organizations must continue their active involvement in
discussions of the public policy issues currently before Congress, including
telecommunications reforms, copyright, and federal support for arts and
humanities projects and institutions.
Publication of the Profile of Humanities and Arts on the Information Highways
will both complement and draw further attention to the considerable work being
done by the Clinton administration to integrate the humanities and arts into
NII planning and development.
The three initial sponsors -- the Getty Art History Information Program, the
Coalition for Networked Information, and the American Council of Learned
Societies -- are committed to continuing the National Initiative. Preparation
of this report is the first key step in an agenda for action; subsequent key
steps include the following:
- Articulating the public benefits of making the humanities and the arts full
contributors to the NII in order to educate policymakers, decision-makers at
standards-setting bodies and funding agencies, private-sector developers and
potential users.
- Advocating the creation of a critical mass of cultural heritage information
in digital form -- the content of the arts and humanities on the information
highways.
- Guiding the development of the required standards, tools and services
necessary for humanities and arts access.
- Making sure that the humanities and the arts are represented in the policy
discussions pertaining to the further evolution of the national and global
information infrastructure by building coalitions with organizations in other
fields or sectors and by identifying policy issues.
To pursue these, the National Initiative expects to open a Washington office to
coordinate the involvement of humanities and arts organizations in discussions,
policy-making and demonstration projects bearing on the development of the
National Information Infrastructure.
Like the Internet, the humanities and the arts have as a primary purpose making
connections: between events, concepts, disciplines, institutions, and
individuals. As a conceptual network, the humanities and the arts encompass
multiple styles and perspectives; they interconnect memory and innovation,
imagination and interpretation, knowledge and inspiration. The nation can
justifiably celebrate the enrichment that the humanities and arts bring to the
quality of its individual and community lives, and work with equal enthusiasm
to adopt the National Information Infrastructure as an extraordinary
opportunity for the sharing, preservation, and enrichment of our cultural
heritage.
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