0.1 Sustainability: the elephant in the room

What to do with these immigrants? One option—it is widespread—is to set quotas on their admission. The institution hires the technicians it needs to run its basic administrative operations. Scholars who want to pursue digital work complain bitterly that the university does not give them the technical and resource support they require. But since the vast majority of the faculties do not want those persons and resources, and since they are expensive . . . etc. etc, Q.E.D.

Or if the quotas are lifted and these persons come into the university, where do they live? The answer is: outside the departments and faculties. That situation makes it extremely difficult to pursue any kind of digital work that isn’t tied directly to classroom pedagogy. It makes it virtually impossible to direct a coherent institutional policy toward the support of digital scholarship. Since the university and its faculties define themselves in relation to their scholarship and research work, the situation gets lost on both sides: it discourages the emergence of digital scholarship, and it sustains, though minimally, the traditional paper-based network. So far as digital scholarship is concerned, the result is a haphazard, inefficient, and often jerry-built arrangement of intramural instruments—free-standing centers, labs, enterprises, and institutes, or special digital groups set up outside the traditional departmental structure of the university. They are expensive to run and the vast majority of the faculty have no use for them. The result is social dislocation both within and without the faculties. Because the dislocation registers most clearly as a struggle for scarce resources, we think we’re dealing with a problem of money. But we’re not. Money isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom of the problem of setting university policy at a time when humanities faculties are uncertain of both their public and their intramural position.

Ii

So in a time like this we are sorely pressed by the question: “What do scholars want?” Whether we work with digital or paper-based resources, or both, our basic needs are the same. We all want our cultural record to be comprehensive, stable, and accessible. And we all want to be able to augment that record with our own contributions.

Those desires lead many of us—perhaps even most of us—to cherish the reliabilities of print-based research and traditional publication, especially monograph publication, and to resist moves toward digital venues. Alas, one might as well hope for the return of the unity of Christendom, a global economy of sailing ships, or the Holy Roman Empire. Of course book culture will not go extinct: human memory is too closely bound to it. But no one any longer thinks that scholarship—our ongoing research and professional communication—can be organized and sustained through print resources.

From that realization many of us imagine that if we digitize all of our cultural heritage, if we do that with care and accuracy, we will have solved the problem. But the simplest reflection exposes how mistaken we would be. After we digitize the books, the books themselves remain. Or, as many thoughtful humanists keep insisting, should remain. Perhaps the greatest of the false promises of digitization is that its simulations will save our books. They will not, though they are provoking us to get seriously involved with the problems that grow, like tares among the wheat, with digitization. If our book heritage is to be saved, we will have to choose to save it intact, not simulate it electronically.