The extensive digitization of cultural heritage materials is one of the most exciting developments in thehumanities and social sciences in the past century, and it should be continued and expanded through a thoughtful combination ofinstitutional, public, and private support. The Commission believes that scholars have an important role to play in the development ofcommercial and nonprofit digital archives alike, and neitherresearch libraries nor companies such as Google have yet gone far enough to encourage dialogue with the scholarly community on suchquestions as the selection of materials for digitization, decisions about what to omit from the digitized representation, or the designof descriptive metadata.
We support efforts such as the Million Book Project, Project Gutenberg, the Open Content Alliance, and othernoncommercial digitization projects. These might include efforts to digitize the archives of public broadcasting (the PublicBroadcasting System [PBS] and others in the United States; theBritish Broadcasting Corporation [BBC] in the United Kingdom). Morebroadly, the Commission recognizes the importance of the cultural institutions whose collections are being digitized in thesealliances and projects: scholarship and public understanding of the cultural record rely on museums, libraries, archives, and culturalinstitutions in general. The record that they preserve is the fundamental dataset for cultural research and education, and it iscritical that they be engaged with scholars and educators in all disciplines, not only in creating interoperable and reusabledigital content, but also to ensure that scholarly work in digital formats being produced today remains accessible in the future. TheWalt Whitman Archive, spearheaded by the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, libraries, is creating a model metadata-encoding-and-transmission-standard (METS) profile for digital thematic research collections, integrating high-quality data andmetadata, in-depth description, high-resolution files, and encoded texts. Created by scholars in collaboration with librarians andarchivists, this model project enables creators of digital thematic research collections to make their work more sustainable anduniversally usable.
The Commission endorses efforts such as the Digital Promise Project (www.digitalpromise.org), which aims toprovide public support for the digitization of collections unlikely to attract commercial investment. Ambitious projects such as thoseundertaken by Google should not allow us to forget about the continued need for investment from the public and nonprofit sector.One recent and carefully reasoned estimate suggests that Google Book Search represents only about a third of the books held inresearch libraries—and there are many forms other than books in which the cultural record is purveyed, and many books not held byresearch libraries.
The Commission also encourages continued investment in this area by the National Endowment for theHumanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Archives, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and otherfunding agencies, both public and private. In addition, we recommend that scholars and university presses cooperate withcommercial digitization efforts with the goal of ensuring that they are as well designed and widely accessible as possible. Scholarsshould participate in institutional repository programs, and universities should develop programs at the national level to sharedigital content for teaching and research and to coordinate and share successful practices for working with digital resources.Institutional repositories should plan and be funded for the long-term preservation and migration of data.
The general public, students, teachers, and scholars want to have online access to the full range of primarysource materials housed in repositories such as museums, historical societies, local libraries and research libraries, specialcollections, archives, and privately held collections. This includes books and journals, newspapers and magazines, governmentdocuments, manuscripts, maps, photographs, satellite images, census data, recorded sound, film, broadcast television, and Web content.Information technology offers ways to reunite dispersed collections, as in the International Dunhuang Project,