"The preservation, transmission, and advancement of knowledge in the digital age are promoted by the unencumbered use and reuse of digitized content for research, teaching, learning, and creative activities.
—Memo on open access to digital representations of works in the public domain from museum, library, and archive collections, Yale University, 2011
This blunt (and for us blatantly obvious) statement—that knowledge advancement is now dependent on the unencumbered use and reuse of digital content, forces us to ask a blunt question in turn: are our educational institutions—our museums, libraries, colleges and universities—doing everything they can to advance knowledge in the digital age?
Our public museums and libraries and our colleges and universities occupy a privileged cultural space, and have earned respect born of their missions to foster and disseminate knowledge ...
To date, most museums, colleges and universities have not yet embraced the radical expansion to their missions that is now possible. Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian has spoken urgently on this topic in his brilliant Age of Scale presentation that should be required reading for all university, college, museum and library staff. Merete Sanderhoff, Researcher at the National Gallery of Denmark has also spoken eloquently about these issues in regard to art museums. There is a brilliant opportunity before us. There is, right now, a huge global audience hungry for the knowledge that museums, colleges and universities, and libraries contain and create. Libraries have taken the lead and have created outstanding resources such as Europeana Regia, which allows for federated searching across five major libraries in four countries. Museums and higher education, however, could do more to create and disseminate open content (and by 'open' we mean allowing, wherever possible, easy downloading, reuse and remixing). Many of these institutions have been timid where they should be bold and are, in our estimation, too often shirking their responsibility as cultural leaders. At the same time the phrase 'endangered humanities' has become a leitmotif in the academic press (for examples, see 'Humanities Committee Sounds an Alarm'
and 'Making the Case for Liberal Arts'
). And just this week, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences released their report, The Heart of the Matter: Humanities and Social Sciences for a vibrant, competitive and secure nation. In today’s New York Times, David Brooks, a contributor to this study cited the statistic that, 'A half-century ago, 14 percent of college degrees were awarded to people who majored in the humanities. Today, only 7 percent of graduates in the country are humanities majors. Even over the last decade alone, the number of incoming students at Harvard who express interest in becoming humanities majors has dropped by a third.'To be sure, there are significant economic pressures on the arts and humanities. These issues have been at the top of the agenda at several recent gatherings of leaders of 4-year colleges as they assess the impact of MOOCs and other changes in the academic landscape. The future of the humanities has also been a focus at the university level. Harvard University just completed and published the 'Humanities Project,' a multi-study effort to understand the history and future of humanities education and its significance. In our opinion, critical to the endurance of the humanities is its ability to scale, it’s willingness to partner, its open-ness. Recently John Palfrey, Head of School at Phillips Academy, Andover, and president of the Board of Directors of the Digital Public Library of America, asked 'Could we imagine what would happen if Phillips Academy teachers