Ken Hamma is a digital pioneer in the global museum community. A classics scholar, Hamma joined the Getty Trust in 1987 as Associate Curator of Antiquities for the Getty Museum. He has since had a number of roles there, including Assistant Director for Collections Information at the Getty Museum, Senior Advisor to the President for Information Policy and his current position, Executive Director for Digital Policy and Initiatives at the Getty Trust.

David Green: Ken, you are in a good position to describe the evolution of digital initiatives at the Getty Trust as you’ve moved through its structure. How have digital initiatives been defined at the Getty and how are they faring at the institutional level as a whole, as the stakes and benefits of full involvement appear to be getting higher?
Ken Hamma: Being or becoming digital as short-hand for the thousands of changes institutions like this go through as they adopt new information and communication technologies has long been discussed at the Getty from the point of view of the technology. And it did once seem that applying technology was merely doing the same things with different tools when, in fact, we were starting to embark upon completely new opportunities. It also once seemed that the technology would be the most expensive part. Now we’ve learned it’s not. It’s content, development and maintenance, staff training, and change management that are the expensive bits.

About 1990 it seemed to me (without realizing the impact it would cause) that it was the Getty’s mission that would and should largely drive investments in becoming digital. That it would require someone from the program side of the house to take more than a passing interest in it. I know that sounds impossibly obvious, but it wasn’t nearly so twenty years ago when computers were seen by many as merely expensive typewriters and the potential of the network wasn’t seen yet at all. Needless to say, the interim has been one long learning curve with risks taken, mistakes made, and both successes and failures along the way. Now, we’ve just got to the point at the Getty where–with a modicum of good will–we can think across all programs with some shared sense of value for the future. We now have a working document outlining the scope and some of the issues for digital policy development at the institution that would cover things like the stewardship and the dissemination of scholarship, digital preservation and funding similar activities elsewhere. Within this scope, we’ll be considering our priorities, the costs and risks involved, and some specific issues such as intellectual property and scholarship, partnerships and what kind of leadership role there might be for the Getty.

Do you see the Getty, or some other entity, managing to lead a project that might pull museums together on some of these issues?
There’s only a certain amount that can be done from inside one institution and there are some fundamental changes that can’t be made and probably need to be made. One of the big problems about technology is its cost. For so many institutions it’s still just too expensive and too difficult. There’s a very high entry barrier–software license and maintenance fees as well as technology staff, infrastructure development and professional services–in short, the full cost of owning technology. The result isn’t just a management problem for museums but an opportunity cost. We’re falling behind as a community by not fully participating in the online information environment.

There was a technology survey in 2004 of museums and libraries that pointed out that although small museums and public libraries had made dramatic progress since 2001, they still lagged behind their larger counterparts.[1] While almost two-thirds of museums reported having some technology funding in the previous year, 60% said current funding did not meet technology needs and 66% had insufficiently skilled staff to support all their technology activities. This problem is complicated by a gap between museums’ community responsibilities and the interests of the commercial museum software providers–notably the vendors’ complete disinterest in creating solutions for contributing to aggregate image collections. There was a similar gap between library missions and OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog) software until OCLC grew to fill that gap in the 1980s.

Can you imagine any kind of a blue-sky solution to this?
Well, imagine a foundation, for example, that took it upon itself to develop and license collection-management and collection-cataloging software as open source applications for institutional and individual collectors. It might manage the software as an integrated suite of web applications along with centralized data storage and other required infrastructure at a single point for the whole museum community. This would allow centralized infrastructure and services costs to be distributed across a large number of participating institutions rather than being repeated, as is the case today, at every institution. Museums could have the benefits of good cataloging and collection management at a level greater than most currently enjoy and at a cost less than probably any individual currently supports.

Managing this as a nonprofit service model could create cataloging and collection management opportunities that are not just faster, better and cheaper, but also imbued with a broader vision for what collecting institutions can do, both individually and as a community in a digital environment. If we could do this by providing open source applications as well as web services, it would build value for the community rather than secure market advantage for a software vendor. A service model like this could also assume much of the burden of dealing with highly variable to non-existent data contributions that have plagued previous attempts to aggregate art museum data. And I think it could do it by supplying consistent metadata largely by enabling more easily accessible and better cataloging tools.[2] This problem of aggregating museum data has a relatively long history and its persistence suggests that though current schemes are certainly more successful, what the community needs is a more systemic approach. One of the problems is that there just isn’t a lot of good museum data out there to be aggregated. So talking about what it would be like to have aggregated repositories other than those that are hugely expensive and highly managed (like ARTstor), it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. There’s not enough there there to aggregate with good results.

Cataloging seems to be the key to this future, as far as museums’ resources are concerned. Would this scenario would be a first step in producing some good common cataloging?
Well, yes. It’s not enough to say to institutions, “You have to be standards-compliant, you have to use thesauri, you have to use standards, you have to do this and do that.” There are a lot of institutions that aren’t doing anything and aren’t going to do things that are more expensive and time consuming. So it’s not going to help to say that collection managers should be doing this. They’re just not going to do it unless its easier and cheaper, or unless there an obvious payoff and there isn’t one of those in the short term.

So such a project, if it were ever undertaken, would be about providing infrastructure, about providing tools?
Yes, as well as thinking about how we maintain those tools and how we provide services. Because most cultural heritage institutions don’t have IT departments and probably never will, how can we think about sharing what’s usually thought of as internal infrastructure? I mean, choose a small museum with a staff of three; you can’t say ‘you can’t have a finance guy because you need IT,’ or ‘you can’t have a director because you need to do cataloging.’ That’s just not going to happen.

There’s a related model that you have been working on that provides a technical solution both to cataloging and to distribution. If I’m right, it’s not about creating a single aggregated resource but rather about enabling others to create a range of different sources of aggregated content, all using metadata harvesting.
Yes, it’s still in its formative stages, but the essential idea is to put together a system that is lightweight, easily implemented by small institutions, doesn’t require huge cataloging overhead and that supports resource discovery. A problem today is that if you wanted to ask for, say, an online list of all Italian paintings west of the Mississippi, that presupposes that all collections with an Italian painting are participating. But we’re so far from that. It’s the rich and well-funded that continue to be visible and the others are largely invisible. So can we come up with a protocol and a data set that would allow for easy resource discovery that would have a low bar for cataloging and metadata production for unique works?

In this project, we’ve gone through a few rounds now, using the recently developed CDWA Lite as the data standard, mapping that to the Dublin Core in the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAIPMH). Dublin Core, as we’ve all learned, is a bit too generic so we’ve applied some domain knowledge to it and have additionally included URL references for images. We’ve collaborated with ARTstor and have done a harvesting round with them. Getty’s paintings collection is in ARTstor not because we wrote it all to DVD and mailed it to New York, but because ARTstor harvested it from our servers. Just imagine we get to the point where all collections can be at least CDWA-Litely cataloged–say just nine fields for resource discovery. Then these can be made available through an exchange protocol like OAIPMH and then interested parties such as an ARTstor (who might even host an OAI server so not every collecting institution has to do that) could harvest them. If we could get that far and we imagine that other aggregators like OCLC might aggregate the metadata even if they didn’t want the images, it could be completely open. The network would support collection access sharing and harvesting that would be limited only by the extent of the network. Any institution (or private collector) could make works available to the network so any aggregator could collect it. A slide librarian at a college, with desktop harvesting tools, could search, discover and gather high-quality images and metadata for educational use by the teachers in that school. Or perhaps intermediate aggregators would do this with value-added services like organizing image sets for Art 101 at a cost that might suggest a different end-user model.

How far away is this from happening?
The protocol exists and will likely very shortly be improved with the availability of OAI-ORE. The data set exists but is still under discussion. That will hopefully be concluded in the next months. And the data standards exist, along with cross collection guides, like CCO, that’s Cataloging Cultural Objects, on using them. The tools should not be too hard to create. The problem again is the institutional one, the usual one when we’re talking about content. Most museums are not willing to enter into such an open environment because they will want to know who is harvesting their collection. It’s the reaction that’s usually summed up by “we’re not sure we can let our images out.” These are those expected nineteenth-century attitudes about protecting content along with the late twentieth-century attitudes that have been foisted on the museum community about “the great digital potential”–generating revenue based on that content as long as they control it and don’t make it accessible. How sad.

The recent NSF/JISC Cyberscholarship Report[3] discusses the importance of content as infrastructure, and how any cyberscholarship in a particular discipline is grounded until that part of cyberinfrastructure is in place. Museums are clearly far behind in creating any such content infrastructure out of their resources. What will it take to get museums to contribute more actively to such an image content infrastructure? Is there a museum organization that could coordinate this or will it take a larger coordinating structure? Will museums be able to do this together or will they need some outside stimulus?
If it isn’t simply a matter of waiting for the next generation, I don’t really know. It would really be helpful if there were, for example, a museum association in this country that had been thoughtfully bringing these issues to the attention of the museum community, but it hasn’t been true for the last twenty years. And museums are different from the library community with respect to content-as-cyberinfrastructure in that they’re always dealing with unique works. This changes two things: first, one museum can’t substitute a work in the content infrastructure for another one (the way in which a library can supply a book that another library cannot); and, secondly, for these unique works there’s a much greater sense of them as property (“its mine”). This, in a traditional mindset, raises the antenna for wanting to be a gatekeeper, not just to the work but even to information about it. You can see this in museums talking about revenue based on images of the works in their collections, or the need for museums to be watching over “the proper use” (whatever that is) of their images. Not that we don’t need to be mindful of many things like appropriate use of works under copyright. So there is still the sense that there’s got to be something (financial) gained from these objects that are “mine,” whereas most of these collections are supported by public dollars and there must be some public responsibility to make them freely available.

‘You’ve talked elsewhere about the “gatekeeper” mentality among many museum professionals, perhaps especially curators. How do you imagine the forward trajectory of this? How will this gatekeeper mentality play out?
Yes, it’s been very frustrating, but I think it is changing. Even over the past few years I think there’s been significant change in how people think about their gatekeeper role. Today–different from ten years ago–I would say curators are less and less gatekeepers, and directors are being caught off-guard by curators proposing greater openness of the sort that will take advantage of network potential. The Victoria & Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum and others are now making images available royalty-free for academic publishing.[4] And along with these changes there is a change in the tenor of the discussion. We want to keep the conversation going as much as possible in hopes that we can move toward a world where objects, especially those in the public domain, can become more fluid in this environment. Many of the attitudes toward intellectual property can be summed up in focusing more on maintaining appropriate attribution for work rather than asserting “ownership,” rather than saying, “it’s mine, you have to pay me for it.” If we’re honest we have to admit that there’s really not a lot of money in the whole system around these kinds of resources. In fact, the real value of these items lies in their availability, their availability for various audiences but especially for continued scholarship and creativity.

That’s a good point. Not too long ago the Yale art historian Robert Nelson said in an interview here that whatever is available online is what will be used, what will create the new canon. He made the analogy to JSTOR. In teaching he notices that the articles he cites that are in JSTOR are the ones that get read; the others don’t.
Yes, that’s absolutely true. And it will take one museum or one major collecting institution to have the imagination to see that and to see that in addition to people coming into the gallery for a curated exhibition, that this other experience of network availability and use has extraordinary value. And if there were two or three really big collections available, literally available as high-quality public domain images, not licensed in any way, one could imagine there would be significant change in attitudes pretty quickly.

You’ve described the open quality of the digital environment as threatening to many in institutions. Could you elaborate a little on that?
The extent to which the opportunities bundled here for realizing mission in non-profits are perceived as threats derives largely from confusing traditional practice with the purpose of the institution. The perception of threats, I think, clearly has been decreasing over the last few years as we become more comfortable with changes (perhaps this is due to generational shift, I don’t know). It is decreasing also as we continue with wide ranging discussions about those traditional practices, which were well suited to business two decades ago but act as inappropriately blunt instruments in the digital environment. These include, for example, the use of copyright to hold public domain hostage in collecting institutions; notions of “appropriate” cataloging, especially for large volume collections that are more suited to a slower paced physical access than they are to the fluidity of a digital environments; and assumptions that place-based mission continues alone or would be in some way diminished by generous and less mediated online access.

In your ACLS testimony back in 2004 on the challenges for creating and adopting cyberinfrastructure, you argue that the most important work for us all ahead is not the technology or data structures but the social element: the human and institutional infrastructure. Is this the weakest link in the chain?
I’m not sure that I would still describe institutions and people as the weakest link, but rather as the least developed relative to technology and the opportunities it brings. This too seems to have changed since the start of the work of the ACLS Commission. We can do plenty with the technology we now have on hand but we’ve frequently lacked the vision or will to do so. One of the most startling examples of this became visible several years ago when the Getty Foundation (the Grant Program) was awarding grants under the Electronic Cataloging Initiative. Many Los Angeles institutions received planning and implementation grants with varied results. One of the most successful would have been predicted by no one other, I suppose, than the hard-working and ingenious staff who are employed there namely, the Pacific Asia Museum. Greater than average success from an institution with, to all appearances, less capacity and fewer resources than other participants was not based on access to better software or on an IT manager who would only accept a platinum support package. It was based on the will and the imagination of staff and the institution.

So would you cite that museum as one that is successfully redefining itself for a digital world?
Yes. You know, there are lots of museums that are doing really good work, but it’s going to take time and the results will show up eventually. If all the effort over the next ten years or so is informed by more open attitudes about making content more available–seeing content as cyberinfrastructure–then it will be all the better. It really is a question of attitude in institutions and a willingness to see opportunities. Almost never believe “we haven’t got the money to do it.” In scholarly communication there are millions of dollars going into print publications that, for example, have a print run of several hundred, for heaven’s sake. You just need to take money out of that system and put it into a much more efficient online publication or collection access system.

It’s about attitude and a willingness to invest effort. The Pacific Asia Museum is a good example. It doesn’t have the budget of the other large institutions in LA and yet it was among the most successful in taking advantage of this opportunity from the Getty’s electronic cataloging initiative. They were very clear about the fact that they wanted to create a digital surrogate of everything in their collection, do some decent cataloging and documentation and make it available. That just sounds so perfectly obvious. But that there are so many institutions that don’t seem to get something so basic, that don’t understand some aspect of that, is just completely astounding to me.
NOTES 

[1] Status of Technology and Digitization in the Nation’s Museums and Libraries (Washington, DC: Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2006),http://www.imls.gov/publications/TechDig05/index.htm.

[2] Recent aggregating efforts include ARTstor and, in recent history, AMICO, both of which look back to the Getty’s Museum Educational Site Licensing project and the earliest attempt to coordinate art museum data at the point of cataloging in Museum Prototype software from the Getty Art History Information Program.

[3] William Y. Arms and Ronald L. Larsen, The Future Of Scholarly Communication: Building The Infrastructure For Cyberscholarship, report of a workshop held in Phoenix, Arizona, April 17-19, 2007,http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~repwkshop/NSF-JISC-report.pdf.

[4] See Martin Bailey, “V&A to scrap academic reproduction fees,” The Art Newspaper 175 (Nov 30, 2006), http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article01.asp?id=525.; The Metropolitan Museum, “Metropolitan Museum and ARTstor Announce Pioneering Initiative to Provide Digital Images to Scholars at No Charge,” press release, March 12, 2007; and Sarah Blick, “A New Movement to Scrap Copyright Fees for Scholarly Reproduction of Images? Hooray for the V & A!,” Peregrinations 2, no. 2 (2007), http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu/vol2-2/Discoveries/Blick.pdf.

James O’Donnell, Provost of Georgetown University, is a distinguished classics scholar (most recently author of Augustine: A New Biography), who has contributed immensely to critical thinking about the application of new technologies to the academic realm. In 1990, while teaching at Bryn Mawr College, he co-founded the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, one of the earliest online scholarly journals, and while serving as Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he was appointed Penn’s Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing. In 2000 he chaired a National Academies committee reviewing information technology strategy at the Library of Congress, resulting in the influential report, LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress. One of his most influential books, Avatars of the Word (Harvard, 1998) compares the impact of the digital revolution to other comparable paradigmatic communications shifts throughout history.David Green: We’re looking here at the kinds of organizational design and local institutional evolution that will need to happen for liberal arts (and other higher-education) institutions to take advantage of a fully-deployed international cyberinfrastructure. How might access to massive distributed databases and to huge computational and human resources shift the culture, practice and structure of these (often ancient) institutions? How will humanities departments be affected–willingly or unwillingly? Will they lead the way or will they need to be coaxed forward?
James O’Donnell: I think the issue you’re asking about here boils down to the question, “What problem are we really trying to solve?” And I think I see the paradox. The NSF Cyberinfrastructure Report, addressed to the scientific community, could assume a relatively stable community of people whose needs are developing in relatively coherent ways. If wise heads get together and track the development of those needs and their solutions, you can imagine it would then just be an ordinary public policy question: what things do you need, how do you make selections, how do you prioritize, what do you do next? NSF has been in this business for several decades. But when you come to the humanities (and full credit to Dan Atkins, chair of the committee that issued the report, for saying “and let’s not leave the other guys behind”) and you ask “what do these people need?” you come around to the question (that I take it to be the question you are asking of us) “Are we sure these people know they need what they do need?”In the humanities, it’s more that for a long time a bunch of people have been able to see, with varying degrees of clarity, a future, but that hasn’t translated to a science-like community of people who share that need, recognize it and are looking around for someone who will meet those needs–if not in one way then another. With the sciences, it’s almost like a natural market. So it’s easy enough for the CI group to say “This is what forward-looking, directionally-sensible humanists need.” But then we look around the institution and say: “Hello, does anyone around here know they need this stuff? And if so, why aren’t people doing more about this?” And we’re all a little puzzled by the gap and trying to put an interpretation on it. Is this a group of people who are burying their heads in the sand and will be obsolete in three to five years? Or is it a group of people who are not seduced by fashion and gimmickry and are just sticking with their business, undistracted and doing darn good work? Or is it somewhere in between?I’m curious about the differences between what we’re told is coming, the next wave of radically magnified networking and computing power, and the first wave, when the Internet hit in the mid-90s. Before that you had a fairly small but robust set of networks that had been built for a relatively tiny number of scientists. Then with the Web and the government white papers, the Internet hit in a pretty big way. Some members of the humanities community realized there were tools and capabilities here that could change the way they do business and a tiny minority proceeded to work in this way. Now, how will things go this time around? Will it just be a repeat: a few innovators declaring rather insufficiently that this will radically alter the way we do business in the humanities and the vast majority skeptically watching and waiting–for who knows what? And within the institutions–will the big changes happening in the sciences “trickle down?” How much interaction is there between the two cultures?
Let me start by trying to characterize the two waves. First a story: When I was at Penn, I took over the networking in 1995 and one of the stories I got was about Joe Bordogna, Dean of the Engineering School, who in 1984 really believed in this networking thing and he wanted to get the campus backbone built and connected to the Internet. Nobody much agreed with him, there was no money for it and no one believed it would happen. He finally got them to agree to build it on the mortgage plan (a fifteen-year loan). Three years after I got there, the mortgage was paid off and we had something like a million dollars a year we could spend on something else (even though, while the cables and wiring were all there, all the electronic equipment attached to it was long gone by the time the mortgage was paid off). That was visionary and it was challenging. But it was clear, in retrospect, that that was what you had to do: you had to build network infrastructure and had to figure out how to make it work. I came into the IT business partly due to the crunch of the mid-90s. Without anyone planning it, this electrifying paradigm shift occurred. The physical form of it was Bill Gates releasing Windows 95 on August 28, 1995, three days before students returned to campus, all demanding it be loaded onto their machines while all the guys in IT support hadn’t had time to figure out how it worked. So there was a real crunch time as we had to figure out how to get all these machines installed, all designed for the new network paradigm (Windows 95 had the new Internet Explorer browser bundled with it). So we were all suddenly moving into this new space. Nobody had planned for it and no one understood it. But what everyone did know was that you had to connect your machine to the network and that’s the paradigm that’s remained fairly stable ever since. You have a basic machine-it’s shrunk to a laptop now (essentially none of our students have “desktop” computers any more)-and you connect to the network, but nothing else has substantially changed. The under-the-hood browser environment is more complex than it used to be, but nobody’s had to take lessons, the change has been seamless. So my concern is that today there’s no high-concept transition. We’ve had to (a) build networks and (b) connect machines to networks. There’s nothing so clear to face now as what we had fifteen to twenty-five years ago.There’s wireless and WiFi that’s exploding, then there’s the continuing miniaturization, and the iPhone. Is that all incremental change?
Yes, and it all feels incremental. The place where there is real change is invisible. It’s in the handset and all the things it can do now and, though the browser on my Blackberry is pretty crippled, I can get core critical information that way and when I’m really bored in a meeting I can read Caesar’s Gallic Wars in Latin on my handheld. It also gets me through an overnight trip now. I don’t lug a laptop around with me quite so much.

And then there’s the additional bandwidth. It’s also incremental but its pretty fast now.
You know, I must have dozed off for a while, because I never noticed the point at which basic web design started assuming broadband.

And assuming video.
Right. But for a long time, basic web design was geared to deliver the best experience over a 28K dialup connection. Now we’re past that. If we go back to the average humanities academic, he’s talking on his cell phone, doing email, and web-surfing every morning. When I read Arts & Letters Daily with my orange juice and I see a piece I like, I hit “Print” and it’s waiting for me at my office when I get there 30 minutes later.

It’s making things faster, but it’s not changing too much?
Yes, this is automation carried to a point where there is a change in kind as well as in degree. I’m reading more kinds of stuff; I’m a better informed person across a wider range of topics than I was. I am a different person because I do this. But it’s an incrementally different kind of person. Nothing substantial has changed.

Now, although I’d like to pursue the social networking route, I also want to ask if you think there are any pull factors at work on humanities faculty. What would entice faculty to really deeply engage with networking? It’s certainly not collaboration, in itself at least.
There’s the real question of whether most academic behavior is really driven by the content of our enquiry versus how much of it is the need to perform. “Published by Harvard University Press” is still a superior form of performance to any form of electronic publication that you can now imagine.

So the intensity of a social intellectual life that might be increased through collaborative engagement online is of no comparison to that kind of imprimatur?
For many that is correct. I mean, I may be writing better articles because I’m in touch with more people. (I just checked the number of emails in my Gmail account over the last 6 months and it’s a mind-boggling number, something like 1500, so compared to the total number of people I ever met, spoke to on the phone or wrote paper letters to back in the day, it’s half an order of magnitude.) But it’s not getting us to a tipping point where instead of doing x I’ll decide to do y. Instead, I’m just running faster in place. And that’s interesting.

So now I’m provosting, I believe in this future. I’ve written about it. I think we can get somewhere. I think it’s exciting. But has my own personal practice changed that much? Not that much.

Could one tipping point be when the majority of the resources you use are in digital form? I know that would vary dramatically across disciplines.
Well it makes it easier for a humanities scholar-provost to write books while provosting. It means I can carry an amazing library on the train and read through stuff I wouldn’t otherwise be able to get to.

Put another way: does the format of one’s resources affect the format of how one will eventually produce or publish one’s work?
Not to my knowledge. I’m still writing “chapters”–and that’s interesting to me. Even at my level, the obvious rewards are for writing in traditional formats rather than for doing something digital–even down to dollar rewards. I mean, if you’re a scholar wanting to break through to a new audience, you do that through a trade publisher in New York.

At Georgetown you work with science departments that are engaged in cyberinfrastructure projects, so you’re quite conversant with what they’re doing and how. And our big question, where we started tonight, is whether there’s any connection between this activity in the sciences at Georgetown and the humanities. Will the humanities and social sciences always be the poor neighbors who might get to see what the sciences are up to and, if they’re lucky, might occasionally benefit from trickle-down effects?

That’s one extreme position–and it’s an external and judgmental one. An internal extreme position is “Well, we’re doing just fine, thanks!” And those two may be somewhat congruent. In between is a more hopeful and responsible position that says “Look, we are moving forward, developing things gradually.” You saw the piece in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education about Stephen Greenblatt’s[1]new course he’s teaching at Harvard? Almost the most important thing about that, by the way, was that they mentioned Stephen Greenblatt by name–because he’s truly famous and writes famous books and if he does this kind of thing then it must be OK.

And so this is the kind of thing that we need, only much more of it? But how old is Ed Ayers’ complaint that despite all of the really substantial and revolutionary work many have done in creating and using digital resources, as a community we were not moving forward, that real cyberscholarship is still-born?[2] He has pushed as hard as anyone and is as prominent as can be. For his pains, they’ve made him first a dean and now a president. But there’s the tendency for people to sit back and say “Look at that Ed go, isn’t he marvelous,” and that’s the puzzle. I’ll come back to say that the core issue for me is still the one of defining the problem that we have to solve persuasively enough that we get enough people interested in solving it.What’s the role of librarians in this? They seem to be leading in pushing for the provision of digital resources.
Librarians are very good inside and outside agitators in this regard. A logical way to make progress happen is to substantially support them in what they do. I have to say at Georgetown every time we do something digital in the library, foot traffic in the building and circulation of physical material goes up. For example, we offer more transparent web access to the library catalog with more links on it, letting you order stuff from other libraries–and foot traffic goes way up. We can’t stop them coming in (and sure aren’t trying to!).

So the building will be around for a while?
Let me be provostial here and say not only will the building be around, but in five years we’ll have to seriously renovate and consider building an extension. And this for many of our stakeholders (board members and donors) is at first glance counterintuitive: “I thought all that stuff was digital now.” But students are going in more and more, and going in collaboratively-to see and talk to each other. I’m left figuring how to budget for it.

You’re clearly deeply engaged by the present. Do you spend much time going the John Seely Brown route[3] and thinking through what the university of twenty years hence will look like?
Well, that’s kind of my day job. We’re about to kick off a formal curriculum review process at Georgetown that will take years to enact. My task is to have my colleagues challenge themselves to think about the abstract questions of what the goals might be for bringing people together in one place for four years and how we might get there. Can we even get to challenging ourselves about the four-year-ishness, the academic-term-ishness? That’s going to be very hard. As long as that is so powerfully the model and so powerfully the business plan and so universal the expectation that even breaking up student time so they can spend a month on a project is really, really hard. Now this has nothing to do in itself with digital, but there are things you can imagine with new empowering technologies that would be really, really cool if they could do that.

Will there be opportunities for serious consideration of totally discontinuous change?
Definitely. But we’re just beginning and we have to acknowledge that anytime you go anywhere near a faculty meeting, you get what I call the Giuliani Diagnosis of NYC traffic: gridlock is upon us and the natural behavior of everyone around us is go get a bigger SUV and lean on the horn some more. Now, that’s not a good thing and wisdom in such a situation is not about reinventing spaces for living together but consists of the first emergency response level of striping certain intersections and changing the timing on the stoplights because everything is so entangled and interwoven. That’s why I say getting students to get a four-week period to sit together to collaborate and do something truly new and different together is extremely hard. Again, for reasons that have nothing to do with electronic technology but everything to do with institutional structures we have chosen with certain kinds of assumptions in place. (Giuliani left New York before they did more than the emergency response, of course.)

The university is a highly evolved form, so it’s hard to suddenly change direction, or grow a new limb.
Yes, so any academic looking at this has to have pessimistic days in which you say “survival will go to the institution that can start afresh.” I’m reading a report by a colleague on “Lifelong Learning in China” and my question for him will be, “Do you think this vision for lifelong learning in China, where they don’t have such a vast installed base as we have, will/could/should be as exclusively associated with the kind of four-year institutions of learning we have in this country, or will the model get created not in rich first-world institutions but in places where productivity and output matter, where people will invent forms that are genuinely creative and more productive and efficient than we have now?”

Will that kind of conversation enter the curriculum review?
I’m chairing it, so we’ll see. But I have no illusions about my ability, resource-challenged as the institution is, simply to grasp the helm and do hard-a-lee and steer off in a different direction. You have to get a whole load of folks shoveling coal in the engine room to get buy-in before you can do that.

I’d like to make an observation: Theodore Ziolkowski, who wrote the book German Romanticism and Its Institutions[4]–how the zeal of the Age of Wordsworth and Goethe turned into bourgeois Victorianism–makes an important point about the university. Von Humboldt had a choice about the research institution that he had in mind. He didn’t have to take over a university and animate it; it could have been any other kind of educational institution–an Institut, a Gymnasium, an Akademie–but he did and there were costs in doing that. (You know the joke about why God created the Universe in only six days? No? Because He didn’t have to make it compatible with the installed base.) Von Humboldt chose to make his university compatible with the installed base and it was a good idea and it worked. But it carried with it the cost of associating the high-end research enterprise with all of that teaching of an increasingly mass audience. It also carried with it all the benefits of associating research with that kind of teaching.

Now this is an ‘I wonder:’ I wonder if we’re not at the tipping point where that cost-benefit ratio isn’t working anymore. And where, therefore, new institutional forms will need to emerge, if money was there to make new institutional forms emerge or if an institutional form emerged with a business plan–and the University of Phoenix doesn’t look like it.Can you imagine any foundations venturing seriously in this direction? They generally seem quite constrained in their thinking.
Well, have you ever read Thorstein Veblen? They should make us memorize his The Higher Learning in America in Provost school. These institutions are a lot about transmitting social and cultural capital and less about academic performance than we might think. There’s a young scholar I know, Joseph Soares, who’s passionate about demonstrating that the best predictor of performance in college by prospective students is not the SAT but class rank: people who have climbed to whatever heap they’re sitting in will go climb to the top of the next heap.[5] People with good test scores can get good test scores, but there’s no telling what will happen when they get out into the world. But this is unfashionable and it connects well with the fact that these institutions are bound up in the creation, preservation and transmission of cultural capital from one generation to the next. That’s a piece of the function of this tiny but trend-setting group of institutions that transmit their trends out to a wider public in remarkable ways. And that function makes institutions full of creative, innovative, iconoclastic people into bastions of conservatism. Good thing for me I love navigating the tensions that result.

NOTES

[1] Jennifer Howard, “Harvard Humanities Students Discover the 17th Century Online,” Chronicle of Higher Education 54, no. 9 (October 26, 2007) A1.

[2] Edward L. Ayers, “Doing Scholarship on the Web: 10 Years of Triumphs and a Disappointment,” Chronicle of Higher Education 50, no. 21 (January 30, 2004) B24-25.

[3] In for example, the chapter “Re-Education,” in John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000).

[4] Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton University Press, 1992).

[5] Joseph Soares, The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite Colleges (Stanford University Press, 2007).