Like Greg Crane and Joyce Ray, who spoke earlier today, I come from the humanities and cultural heritage sector, where building sustainable digital libraries is a topic of never-ending discussion and debate. My interest in the subject and in NSDL is manifold: I have been trained as a humanities scholar; I work in the cultural heritage sector; and I am a tax-paying citizen with a number of concerns about scientific literacy in our society. And like Greg Crane and Joyce Ray, I care about what Crane referred to as time, place, and heritage, in other words, context.

In our world, we ask the same questions about digital library development as I have heard today: for whom are we doing this? What content should we include? Provided in what service environment? How do we pay for it? How do we preserve it? How will we know when we have succeeded? And what is the transformation of education anyway?!

While I will not perorate for 3 hours, as did Edward Everett when delivering the real Gettysburg address, I cannot be as eloquent and memorable as Lincoln in his words of dedication.

Questions we were asked to focus on today are:

Where is digital research taking us?
What effect does this research have on innovation and teaching?
Do digital libraries foster innovation or are they simply a way to distribute learning resources?
Will they disappoint us as so much educational technology has?
Will digital libraries fulfill their epistemological promise?

While these are engaging and important questions, let me first add a few words about the topics covered by our panelists today, from my perspective as an interested observer looking into this space at a slight angle to the sciences.

First, about sustainability: there is only one thing to know about how to sustain an enterprise like this. It is to build something that people cannot live without. As you think about what you are designing and how it can be built and sustained, ask yourself this: Who would complain if NSDL went away tomorrow? School teachers? Congressmen? Deans of science and engineering? Whoever cares or should carethose are your stakeholders. Design and build with their mind in mind, as the Firesign Theater would say. You are not here to please yourselves and impress each other, though those may be fiercely motivating factors. And bear in mind that some of the stakeholders might be the audience for whom you are building these resources as well, but not necessarily.

Eileen mentioned subsidy, as Mike Lesk mentioned funding by communities instead of individuals. What both speakers were pointing to is the fact that scientific educational materials are not consumer goods. We should not be assuming that the future of NSDL depends crucially on the ability to compete with other types of educational commodities in a commercial market. Education is a public sector commitment, for all that it depends on the private sector for content, and ideas, and philanthropy. Those, too, in the long run, are forms of subsidies.

So, we need subsidies.

The question is from whom?

The context in which to think about these things is the broader educational landscape, and I mean broader than the university campus. One the one hand, Mike Lesk sites a Harvard University librarian asserting that he desires control over the information assets on the campus. Fine. But we are not talking just about university information assets in NSDL, but also about K-12 and beyond graduation. I was reminded instead of the current Harvard president, an economist, who points out that universities live and flourish in a world of tax subsidies and federal research funds and they need to give back now. Larry Summers is not known to be soft-minded and sentimental about most things. He is talking about the role of higher ed in an information landscape that says yes, we should be subsidizing the education of the next generation of the students we want to recruit for Harvard.

The other context is the broader so-called crisis in scholarly communication in which the traditional print-based modes of production and dissemination of scholarly output that has worked in the past is dysfunctional a system where we see the subsidy models breaking down at the same time we see information technology offering some potential solutions in some cases.

You are not charged with fixing the system, but with demonstrating that new technologies create valuable scholarly and education products and services that make it worth figuring out how to sustain this enterprise.

Next, I will offer only a few comments about technology. I have little to add to what our distinguished speakers said. I will only contribute a note of appreciation for Carl Lagozes comments about the perils of mapping traditional libraries onto the digital space and hoping to end up with a digital library. There is much about library and archival practice that seems rational and well-thought out, but is in fact the result of years of trial and error and making do with few resources for decades. It is exhilarating to see the effort of digital librarians to parse the practices of librarians and archivists result in a new understanding of the largely unexamined assumptions that library and archival practitioners live and work by. There is a useful distinction we can make newly important in the digital realm between libraries and archives, for example. Libraries deal largely with finished bounded, edited, reviewed, polished, and replicable products called books or serials. They have elegant metadata/cataloging standards in part because they are by nature static and highly normalized prior to production as consumer goods.

Archives, on the other hand, are large, idiosyncratically organized sets of often unique or rare materials, or highly structured (for legal reasons) if they are business or government records. The number of items is great, so the description tends to be at a gross level, rather than fine, collection-level rather than item-level. In both libraries and archives, the underlying tension remains: what level of description is desirable versus what level of description is feasible. There is no single answer, and human judgment always has, and in my view always will, play a crucial role, especially in the everyday world of constrained resources and many things competing for our attention and the attention of the user.

And finally, a word about education, and here I will insist that the proper context for viewing education is one that mixes politics, public policy, legislation, and economics.

Congress thinks that K-12 education is not sound and that throwing more money at science and engineering and technology can help. For a variety of fascinating reasons, legislators are like their constituents: they want to think that there are scientific or technical solutions that will address our most pressing social problems. More funding of science, they will say, and better scientific education will cure what ails us. They are not looking at these problems and saying we need more classics, or history, or even, oddly enough, foreign languages.

So you are in a privileged position.

I, again as a humanist, can only say that I wish I and my colleagues had a basic science and engineering and math literacy, and that should be the fundamental aim of the pedagogy you are developing here. Yes, if successful you will catch young scientists in the bud and grab them young. But more important is the opportunity and obligation to create a fundament literacy in science and math and engineering, so that we, the general public, are neither intimidated by science nor nave thinking that disease can be cured by the Human Genome Project plus billions, or that most social problems such as education! can be addressed by more technology and bigger science.

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