Cultural Infrastructure and the Public

In 1990 the World Wide Web was just an idea—or, more specifically, a proposal entitled “Information Management” 1being circulated by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la recherché nucléaire/European Organization for Nuclear Research). In 1993 there were two hundred known Web servers. 2Ten years later, in 2003, there were forty million servers, and in 2006, that number has doubled to more than eighty million servers hosting billions of Web pages. 3For many people, access to the Internet and its resources is now indispensable, but it is more than a place where people shop, seek information, or find entertainment. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project study, 4the Internet “creates new online town squares” and “enhances the relationship of citizens to their government.”

Putting the historical record online opens it to people who rarely have had such access it before. For example, the Library of Congress allows high-school students into its reading rooms only under special circumstances, but any student may enter its American Memory site 5to view the virtual archive on the same terms of access as the most senior historian or member of Congress. If digitized properly, many online texts and images are accessible to those with visual impairments or other disabilities through screen readers and other supportive technologies.

Digital collections also allow for juxtapositions of works that are held in disparate physical collections. For example, the William Blake Archive 6not only makes the works of Blake available to the general public but also allows users to juxtapose and compare works that are physically housed in libraries, museums, and art galleries around the world.

This remarkable connectivity has brought scholars into broader communication with nonscholarly audiences, as well. Humanists and social scientists now routinely hear from students and members of the general public who have found their e-mail addresses and have questions. Scholars who have created Web sites based on their work are often pleasantly surprised that their work has found entirely new audiences—or, rather, that new audiences have found that work. Nonacademic users of the University of North Carolina’s archival Web site Documenting the American South 7speak eloquently of feeling “privileged to have access to these primary sources, as if they had entered an inner sanctum where they did not fully belong,” reports former university librarian Joe Hewitt.

Still, access is far from universal. Those who use freely accessible resources will find materials published before World War I more plentiful than newer materials, owing to copyright limitations. Scholars and members of the public who are not affiliated with research universities will find that access to a significant number of resources is by subscription only, and that subscription is priced at a level that only institutions can afford. One independent scholar of history and respondent to a survey on use of digital resources (conducted in the course of the Commission’s work by the Center for History and New Media), speaks for many when she says:

I am an independent scholar [and] so do not have the kind of access to facilities that academics do. A research associateship at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center allows me the access via Mount Holyoke College, [but] only during the term of the association. So yes, there are problems for those of us not attached to a subscribing institution.

In addition to digitizing materials, projects to collect and preserve born-digital content are critically important. In 1994, for example, film director Steven Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, with a mission to videotape and preserve the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses. Today the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive 8at the University of Southern California has collected more than fifty-two thousand eyewitness testimonies in fifty-six countries and thirty-two languages, all of which are extensively indexed so that sophisticated searching in the archive can be easily conducted by anyone via the Internet. In 1996 The Internet Archive 9was founded with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.