Addressed to: Universities; federal and private funding agencies

Implementation: Determine the amount and efficacy of funding that now goes to support developing cyberinfrastructure for humanities and social sciences from all sources; through annual meetings and ongoing consultation, coordinate the goals this funding aims to achieve; and aim to increase both funding and coordination over the next five years, including commercial investments that are articulated with the educational community’s agenda.

Senior scholars, research librarians, university leaders, state and national legislators, and members of the public interested in the cultural record should regard the development of the humanities and social science cyberinfrastructure as an essential strategic priority. Other countries already recognize this to be so. In European countries and in Canada and Australia, humanities and social science cyberinfrastructure is more generously funded (relative to the size of the population) than in the United States, and research frameworks integrate the support of humanities and social sciences with the support of science and engineering.

In 2005 the British Academy issued an academic policy review in which the leading recommendation was that “relevant UK institutions and bodies adopt a coordinated and coherent strategic approach to e-resource provision and access, based on research community needs.” 1

The German e-Science Initiative was announced by the German Ministry for Research and Education (BMBF) in March 2004, coupled with a call for proposals in the areas of grid computing, e-learning, and knowledge management. The e-Science Initiative and D-Grid were launched on September 1, 2005. Currently, BMBF is funding over a hundred German research organizations with €100 million [$124 million] over the next five years. For the first three-year phase of D-Grid, the support is almost €20 million [$25 million]. One of seven projects currently funded under this initiative is TextGrid, described as a “community grid for text-based disciplines.” 2

In Australia $542 million Australian dollars ($405 million) is targeted for the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, a major initiative under the Australian government’s “Backing Australia’s Ability—Building Our Future through Science and Innovation” program. This program “aims to bring greater strategic direction and coordination to national research infrastructure investments” while providing researchers with “access to major research facilities and the supporting infrastructure and networks necessary to undertake world-class research.” 3One of ten areas of emphasis in this program is “platforms for collaboration,” described in the strategic road map as aimed in part at the needs of the humanities and social sciences. 4

Investments in cyberinfrastructure are organized differently in each country, but from the point of view of this Commission, the salient fact is that they do include the humanities and social sciences. More importantly, the humanities and social sciences are a fully integrated part of the conversation and planning in these countries in a way that has not occurred in the United States. The United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia are only three of the nations gearing up strategic efforts in cyberinfrastructure with the humanities and social sciences in mind. The United States must make similar investments if we are to compete internationally—for students, corporate funding, and cultural impact.

Addressed to: University presidents, boards of trustees, provosts, and counsels; university presses; funding agencies; libraries; scholarly societies; Congress

Implementation: The Association of American Universities, in collaboration with other organizations such as the National Humanities Alliance, the Scholarly Publishing and Research Coalition, and the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, should take a leadership role in coordinating the engagement of the humanities and social sciences with issues of information policy.

Open access is critical to constructing and deploying meaningful cyberinfrastructure, and it will be important for the humanities and social sciences to engage in active dialogue and then to lobby effectively concerning legislative and policy developments in this area—for example, in support of the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006. The Open Content Alliance offers one good platform for the dialogue the Commission wishes to promote; it lists as its members a number of libraries and museums as well as commercial content providers, software companies, and search engine companies. We encourage scholarly societies and university presses—currently unrepresented—to join the Alliance. 5

The Commission also strongly encourages the funders of research in the humanities and social sciences to require from applicants a plan for sharing and preserving data generated using grant funding, and we urge universities with commercial digitization partners to address long-term ownership and access issues when creating those partnerships. We also call on university counsels, boards of trustees, and provosts to provide aggressive support for the principles of fair use and open access, and to promote awareness and use of Creative Commons licenses. 6We call on senior academic leaders to ensure that their own practices (as producers of intellectual property and as editors of journals) and the practices of university presses, libraries, and museums support fair use and open access. And, finally, the Commission calls on scholarly societies and universities to advocate that Congress redress imbalances in intellectual property law that currently prevent or inhibit preservation, discourage scholarship, and restrain research and creativity.

Laws, policies, and conventions surrounding copyright and privacy are an implicit part of the cyberinfrastructure in the social sciences and humanities. We must align current law with the new realities of digital knowledge environments. Laws that support these knowledge environments must take into account the characteristics of digital content and the practices that make that content productive. The recent effort of the Copyright Office to address the problem of “orphan works”—works with uncertain copyright status, which therefore cannot be used with impunity by scholars and others—is a welcome example of a key agency in this debate taking an appropriate leadership role. 7We urge Congress to pass legislation that adopts the statutory language recommended by the Register of Copyrights in her report. Another example of such leadership is the Library of Congress’s current study of Section 108 of the copyright code and its implications for preservation.

The Commission can offer no simple solutions to complex issues of intellectual property. Scholars, after all, create as well as use intellectual property and so are on both sides of these contentious debates. But researchers have traditionally embraced openness and sharing, and that spirit should be encouraged and facilitated in the digital environment. They should not be intimidated by the efforts of rights holders to restrict valid educational uses of materials. Scholars should, for example, be encouraged to take full advantage of the “fair use” provisions of the copyright laws.

While scholars advocate public and legal policies of openness and access, they similarly must advocate these policies within their own communities to the greatest extent practically and legally possible. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Open CourseWare is an interesting and instructive example at the level of the core instructional activities of faculty: it freely distributes course materials. Universities need to consider the impact of their technology transfer and intellectual property policies; university presses and scholarly societies need to envision creative dissemination models that reflect academic values, and then lobby for the actual resources needed to realize those models; museums need to make their digitized surrogates freely available, as they already increasingly do. All parties should work energetically to ensure that scholarship and cultural heritage materials are accessible to all—from a student preparing a high-school project to a parent trying to understand the issues in a school-board debate to a tourist wanting to understand Rome’s art and architecture.

Addressed to: Universities; federal and private funding agencies; Internet-oriented companies

Implementation: A private foundation, a federal funding agency, an Internet business, and one or more university partners should cosponsor recurring annual summits to explore new models for commercial/nonprofit partnerships and to discuss opportunities for the focused creation of digital resources with high educational value and high public impact.

Universities and those who fund them (privately or publicly) need to reallocate resources to support digital cultural activities and develop new financial models for making those activities sustainable. For-profit companies that work with digital cultural heritage materials or publish humanities and social-science research need to address long-term preservation and access issues.

Nearly every discussion in the course of the Commission’s investigations emphasized the urgent need for new funding and new models of financial sustainability to fund certain core areas, such as preservation and curation of cultural materials, innovative research in the humanities and social sciences, electronic publication, and development of tools and resources for classroom use. Recent partnership agreements between research university libraries and Google represent one model of financial sustainability, although some question the long-term harmony of interests and missions in these partnerships. Even if such questions persist, continued experimentation with new forms of cooperation between the private sector and cultural institutions remains of utmost importance. Commercial and nonprofit partnerships are possible, and commercial investment has often benefited scholarship and the dissemination of cultural heritage content in North America. 8Such partnerships can contribute a great deal to innovation as well as promote entrepreneurial engagement in challenges (such as digitization) that the cultural sector will be unable to address by itself.

Still, there will always be scholarship, teaching, and research that can be conducted only with public subsidy, either directly from the government or from tax-exempt private philanthropy. Government funding agencies, most notably the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), should continue their support of digital projects, including digital tools and other elements of the cyberinfrastructure. We believe that increased support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for work in the digital humanities will benefit both the humanities and computer science. The recent joint initiative of the NEH, NSF, and Smithsonian Institution to fund the documentation of endangered languages demonstrates that such a partnership can succeed. 9Other areas of digital library development should be cosponsored with federal agencies such as the Library of Congress, IMLS, Smithsonian, National Archives and Records Administration, NSF, and National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a both a leader in and a leading funder of the application of digital technologies to the humanities and social sciences. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Packard Institute for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and others have also provided support to critical initiatives. While many other private funding agencies have supported digital projects, these efforts have not so far been coordinated purposefully to achieve the kind of cyberinfrastructure envisioned in this report.

Addressed to: Senior scholars; scholarly societies; university administrators; senior research librarians and research library organizations; academic publishing organizations; federal funding agencies; private foundations

Implementation: Increase federal and foundation funding to one or more scholarly organizations in the area of humanities and social science computing so that they can work with member organizations of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and others to establish priorities for cyberinfrastructure development, raise awareness of research and partnership opportunities among scholars, and coordinate the evolution of research products from basic to applied.

Librarians, rather than scholars, have provided much of the recent leadership within the academy on issues of cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences. Reflecting the conservative culture of scholarship, some scholars have questioned librarians’ investments in building digital collections and acquiring online resources. Given that the library constitutes the historic infrastructure of scholarship, it is entirely appropriate that librarians have sought to re-ignite scholarly engagement with infrastructural issues. Nevertheless, others now need to take up the cause and shoulder their leadership responsibilities. As the task force of the American Association of Universities indicated in its 2004 report Reinvigorating the Humanities, “[u]niversity presidents, provosts and humanities deans” must “support the development and use of digital information and technology in the humanities.” 10

Leadership requires structure. Humanities organizations, in particular, should develop new means of sharing information and setting agendas. Again, the example of the library community is instructive. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL); Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR); and Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which is about to absorb the Research Libraries Group, have made technological transformation central to their missions and programming. They have, in turn, created vehicles—the Coalition for Networked Information, the Digital Library Federation, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition—dedicated entirely to providing leadership on these issues. Very few cognate efforts exist in the humanities and social sciences. The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), H-Net, and the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) are three examples, but these have not enjoyed the kind of financial support from the humanities and social sciences communities that ARL, CLIR, OCLC, or RLG have received from the research library community. Scholarly societies have a special role to play in providing—and funding—similar leadership for scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

At the campus level, university administrators should go out of their way to ensure that representatives from the social sciences and humanities are at the planning table alongside librarians, scientists, and engineers when issues of cyberinfrastructure are being decided. All too often, humanists and social scientists learn about policy and funding decisions after they are made. By the same token, scholars in the humanities and social sciences must not hesitate to insist on being included in these discussions and decisions.

Addressed to: Universities; research libraries; the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS); the National Academies; the National Archives; major private foundations; major scholarly societies; individual leaders in the humanities and social sciences

Implementation: Federal funding agencies and private foundations should establish programs that address workforce issues in digital humanities and social sciences, from short-term workshops to postdoctoral and research fellowships to the cultivation of appropriately trained computer professionals. The ACLS should lead its member organizations in developing uniform policies with respect to digital scholarship in tenure and promotion.

The Commission believes that digital scholarship is the inevitable future of the humanities and social sciences, and that digital literacy is a matter of national competitiveness and a mission that needs to be embraced by universities, libraries, museums, and archives. In order to foster digital research, teaching, and publishing, we recommend specifically that there be

We might expect younger colleagues to use new technologies with greater fluency and ease, but with tenure at stake, they will also be more risk- averse. There is a widely shared perception that academic departments in the humanities and social sciences do not adequately reward innovative work in digital form. A handful of recent examples provide exceptions to the norm, but in the most elite universities, traditional scholarly work, in the form of a single-authored, printed book or article published by a university press or scholarly society, is the currency of tenure and promotion; work online or in new media—especially work involving collaboration—is not encouraged. Senior scholars now have both the opportunity and the responsibility to take certain risks, first among which is to condone risk taking in their junior colleagues and their graduate students, making sure that such endeavors are appropriately rewarded.

How will younger scholars in the humanities and social sciences engage these new technologies and methods? Experience demonstrates that some will find a way of their own, but it also suggests that if more than a few are to pioneer new digital pathways, more formal venues and opportunities for training and encouragement are needed. The Commission recommends the creation of brief (one- to three-week) workshops for younger scholars—perhaps located at some of the existing centers in the digital humanities and social sciences and organized in conjunction with scholarly societies—focusing on how to do research, how to present the products of scholarship, and how to teach in the digital era. One model could be the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Image, Sound, Text and Technology Institute Program, which provides grants for such workshops. 12A recent workshop on digital scholarship offered only to younger scholars in one very specific domain—the history of science and technology—found itself vastly oversubscribed. 13But we should not neglect training opportunities for midcareer scholars who wish to learn about new tools, resources, and approaches.

It is also important to remember that students, and often their teachers, need help in making sense of what they find. For example, a 1930s photograph of sharecroppers, with the imprimatur of the Library of Congress’s American Memory site, may seem to be a transparent reflection of social and historical reality rather than a created and composed artifact with a larger political message. We recommend that resources be devoted to making students (and citizens) into sophisticated and critical consumers of the vast cultural heritage that has been placed at their fingertips. Some of this can be done electronically, but workshops for K–12 teachers who use the Web in their classrooms are badly needed as well.

Addressed to: Universities; Congress; state legislatures; public funding agencies; private foundations

Implementation: Universities should develop national and international fellowships at existing humanities and social science computing centers, and develop new centers with such programs, with a combination of university, federal, and private funding.

A robust cyberinfrastructure should include centers that support collaborative work with specialized methods. When human, institutional, or technical resources become too expensive to replicate at every institution, it makes sense to provide those resources through a more limited number of national centers. This is what has already been done in the sciences, and it is what should also be done in the humanities and social sciences. Public funds should be at the forefront of support to such national centers of excellence in digital humanities and social science, as crucial seedbeds of further innovation.

The humanities and social science cyberinfrastructure should include a network of such centers distributed around the country. Centers might focus on particular methods or tools—for example, the application of Geographic Information Systems or data-mining or visualization to humanities and social science research problems. Centers might also, in some cases, be devoted to research involving copyrighted digital materials or research involving confidential social science data. The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is one such national center in the social sciences; the Vanderbilt Television News Archive might be taken as an example or a starting point with respect to copyrighted material. The Library of Congress’s NDIIPP (National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program) partnerships are exploring the creation of data centers to serve other communities, using a range of business models.

Universities should foster interdisciplinary laboratories and research groups that include both technical and subject expertise. “Once humanities faculty began using the laboratory in their research,” Stanford University computer scientist Marc Levoy told the Commission, “they would also find creative ways to fold its technology into their teaching—for example, through project-based assignments in upper-level courses. This would bring humanities students into the lab, some of whom have dual backgrounds, and so could help run the lab.” Provost James O’Donnell of Georgetown University, speaking to the Commission, advocated “zones of experimentation and innovation for humanists.” O’Donnell added that those zones should be “part and parcel of the formal academic structure. Ghettos are not the answer. We need instead the creation of privileged but open communities, where the very best young people are challenged to invent, experiment, break things, and succeed.” Exemplary models of such centers include the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York; the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; MATRIX, the Center for Humane Arts Letters and Social Sciences at Michigan State University; and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois has recently shown interest in arts, humanities, and social sciences, and its involvement in this effort would be most welcome. 14

Addressed to: Funding agencies, public and private; scholars; librarians; curators; publishers; technologists

Implementation: University consortia such as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation should license the SourceForge software and make it available to open-source developers in academic institutions. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) should support the development, maintenance, and coordination of community-based standards such as the Text Encoding Initiative, Encoded Archival Description, Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard, and Visual Resources Data Standards. The National Science Foundation (NSF), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, IMLS, and other funding agencies should support the development of tools for the analysis of digital content.

Scholars in the humanities and social sciences should work with librarians, curators, publishers, and technologists to develop tools for producing, searching, analyzing, vetting, and representing knowledge, as well as standards for documenting data of all kinds. For hundreds of years, the most important tools of humanists and social scientists were pen or brush and paper. Today, scholars require a range of digital tools for research, teaching, and writing, including tools for finding, filtering and reviewing, processing and organizing, annotating, analyzing, and visualizing digital information. Even though we can point to current efforts in many of these areas, lack of coordination among them is a problem: a great deal of tool building is done on a local scale, and this results in unnecessary redundancy of effort. 15

In part, this is because academic software developers may be prohibited by their university counsels from participating in open-source communities such as SourceForge (not because of any university opposition to open-source but, instead, because of statutory prohibitions against accepting the terms of use that these communities impose, especially regarding issues such as indemnification and governing law in the resolution of disputes). In that case, it is incumbent on the university community to provide and encourage the use of a parallel community infrastructure for open-source software development, in order to avoid duplication of effort and ensure that tool builders in academic settings are not specially disadvantaged compared with tool builders outside universities. Such an effort could begin with a consortium of major universities (for example, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation) licensing the SourceForge software and then making it available for use by academic open-source software developers on acceptable terms.

Tools developed in one discipline may frequently be transferable or adaptable to other disciplines, but scholars may be unaware of tools developed outside their own discipline. Libraries, archives, and museums are positioned to serve as bridges among the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and arts in integrating widely disparate information and building new interdisciplinary relationships. The library of the University of California, Riverside, for example, is conducting research aimed at producing better machine-based, automatically generated metadata to improve the search and retrieval of multidisciplinary online content. 16The Museums and Online Archives Collaboration Community Toolbox, developed by the California Digital Library, will enable museums and libraries to produce standards-based data for broad content sharing. 17

With respect to open standards, commercial entities that create significant digital collections (such as Google with its digitization of collections from five major U.S. research libraries) should produce at least one version of the resource in a nonproprietary format, if only for deposit with and local use by the institution that holds the originals being digitized—and universities should speak with a stronger voice on that point. Funding agencies—including the NSF, NEH, NARA, NDIIPP, and IMLS—and academic leaders should support the development and maintenance of digital tools and increase direct funding for the development and documentation of standards that improve the preservation and interoperability of digital content in the humanities and social sciences. Such support should include the development of opportunities for collaboration among tool builders and between tool builders and standards organizations, as well as scholarly validation of the tools and standards they use. The NEH, NARA, and IMLS should coordinate support for standards activity and should harmonize these efforts with the parallel tool- and resource-building activities of organizations such as the Digital Library Federation.

New approaches are necessary to capture and integrate digital resources from different kinds of cultural heritage organizations, which have followed very different practices in describing and organizing their collections, and to maintain the intellectual context of collections when they are digitized. A research project at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has created a collection-level registry and item-level repository, based on the Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Protocol, that allows browsing of collection descriptions as well as content searching within and across collections. The project also serves as a testbed for research to improve the development of integrated, large-scale multidisciplinary digital libraries. 18When best practices are identified, projects of this type can be scaled up to contribute to the “Global Digital Library.” Interoperability in software and in data is never perfect, but, in both cases, it has a better chance of emerging when information about those resources is open, easy to find, and readily reusable. Interoperability across the humanities and social science cyberinfrastructure therefore requires the continued development and promotion of vendor-independent, open standards for document modeling and data documentation as well as open-source methods for software development.

Humanists and social scientists and their organizations must build the tools and standards they need: others will not do it for them. The summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities, supported by the NSF and held at the University of Virginia in September 2005, is a promising first step toward improving coordination in developing tools. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has also been funding the development of open-source tools. The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium is a long-standing and exemplary community-based standards organization focused on literary and linguistic texts, their uses, and their users.

Addressed to: TheNational Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and other funding agencies, both public and private; scholars; research libraries and librarians; university presses; commercial publishers

Implementation: National centers with a focus on particular methods or disciplines can organize a certain amount of scholar-driven digitization. Library organizations and libraries should sponsor discipline-based focus groups to discuss priorities with respect to digitization. When priorities are established, these should be relayed to the organizers of annual meetings on commercial and nonprofit partnerships, and they should be considered in the distribution of grant funds by federal agencies and private foundations. Funding to support the maintenance and coordination of standards will improve the reusability of digital collections. The NEA, NEH, and IMLS should work together to promote collaboration and skills development—through conferences, workshops, and/or grant programs—for the creation, management, preservation, and presentation of reusable digital collections, objects, and products.

The extensive digitization of cultural heritage materials is one of the most exciting developments in the humanities and social sciences in the past century, and it should be continued and expanded through a thoughtful combination of institutional, public, and private support. The Commission believes that scholars have an important role to play in the development of commercial and nonprofit digital archives alike, and neither research libraries nor companies such as Google have yet gone far enough to encourage dialogue with the scholarly community on such questions as the selection of materials for digitization, decisions about what to omit from the digitized representation, or the design of descriptive metadata.

We support efforts such as the Million Book Project, Project Gutenberg, the Open Content Alliance, and other noncommercial digitization projects. These might include efforts to digitize the archives of public broadcasting (the Public Broadcasting System [PBS] and others in the United States; the British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC] in the United Kingdom). More broadly, the Commission recognizes the importance of the cultural institutions whose collections are being digitized in these alliances and projects: scholarship and public understanding of the cultural record rely on museums, libraries, archives, and cultural institutions in general. The record that they preserve is the fundamental dataset for cultural research and education, and it is critical that they be engaged with scholars and educators in all disciplines, not only in creating interoperable and reusable digital content, but also to ensure that scholarly work in digital formats being produced today remains accessible in the future. The Walt 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 and metadata, in-depth description, high-resolution files, and encoded texts. Created by scholars in collaboration with librarians and archivists, this model project enables creators of digital thematic research collections to make their work more sustainable and universally usable. 19The Institute of Museum and Library Services has supported the development of A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections, 20which establishes principles for the creation, preservation, and management of digital collections and objects and is now maintained by the National Information Standards Organization. Likewise, Cataloging Cultural Objects, 21a tool developed by the Visual Resources Association with input from the library, archives, and museum communities, promotes good descriptive practices across disciplines. These kinds of tools should be continued and expanded.

The Commission endorses efforts such as the Digital Promise Project (www.digitalpromise.org), which aims to provide public support for the digitization of collections unlikely to attract commercial investment. Ambitious projects such as those undertaken 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 in research libraries—and there are many forms other than books in which the cultural record is purveyed, and many books not held by research libraries. 22In public and nonprofit digitization efforts, priority must be placed on those collections that commerce is unlikely to fund. They will probably be collections held by institutions that are content-rich and technology-poor, such as historically black colleges and universities, which are custodians of vast and important collections documenting the lives and heritage of African Americans.

The Commission also encourages continued investment in this area by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Archives, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and other funding agencies, both public and private. In addition, we recommend that scholars and university presses cooperate with commercial digitization efforts with the goal of ensuring that they are as well designed and widely accessible as possible. Scholars should participate in institutional repository programs, and universities should develop programs at the national level to share digital 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 primary source materials housed in repositories such as museums, historical societies, local libraries and research libraries, special collections, archives, and privately held collections. This includes books and journals, newspapers and magazines, government documents, 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, 23which makes information and images of more than a hundred thousand manuscripts, paintings, textiles, and other artifacts from Dunhuang and other Silk Road sites freely available on the Internet; to compare exemplars (for example, the Shakespeare quartos 24or the many variants of the Roman de la Rose 25); to assemble the works of single creators, such as the photographs of Mathew Brady; 26or to aggregate disparate examples pertaining to a single theme, such as the University of Nebraska Press’s Gallery of the Open Frontier, with 23 thousand images of the American West. 27We have only begun to realize the potential of networked cultural heritage information.