0.1 Sustainability: the elephant in the room  (Page 10/12)

NINES was born out of a reflection on those daunting realities. Unless integrated into what I will call the online World Library, projects like The Rossetti Archive are only minimally useful to scholarship. Hence the emergence of NINES, which was conceived as a small model for exploring a problem of informational design for scholarly work at a global scale. It was a response to the following question: assuming a distributed world network of objects like The Rossetti Archive , how should it be organized and its materials integrated? A key initial decision was to move against the promiscuous state of information available on the web. NINES established itself as a peer-reviewing agent that would identify and assemble a corpus of trusted online resources.

It took only a few years of NINES development work to realize that the problems NINES was attempting to address were not fundamentally logical or ontological, least of all technical. They were political and institutional, and they came largely in three forms.

First are online resources that in a traditional scholarly sense are excellent. But the projects I refer to are designed and developed in digital formats—typically HTML—that are not only a priori unsustainable; they cannot exploit the integrating functions that make web technology such a powerful social network. Quite a few online sites of this kind exist and more appear every day. Unless this work is remediated it will be lost.

Second are resources that are internally well-designed but that remain, by choice or by circumstance, sui generis online agents. They do not participate in the kind of second-order integration pursued by a project like NINES, where independent and globally distributed works expose themselves to the special interests of educators and research scholars. Moreover, NINES is itself only a model—a small, operating imagination of how the World Library might be organized. Beyond our special projects, beyond the conceptual model of NINES, lies “the unplumbed salt estranging sea” of various independent institutions.

Third are two highly problematic kinds of traditional scholarly resources. On one hand are those that lack any online presence at all: university press backlists, for instance, or the current and/or back issues of many scholarly journals. On the other are materials being hurled on the Internet in corrupt forms by Google and other commercial agents: materials that are badly scanned, carelessly or merely randomly chosen, poorly if at all structured. And the proprietary interests of the agents who control these materials have so far obstructed an effective involvement of the scholarly community.

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“Not what but who.” It’s a fact that most colleges and universities have not formulated comprehensive or policy-based approaches to online humanities scholarship. Resources for the use of media in the classroom, including electronic and web media, are fairly common. But a commitment of institutional resources to encourage digital scholarship is very rare. Scholars who have serious digital interests regularly complain about the lack of institutional support. But it’s clear that the universities are responding to facts on the ground: i.e., to the scholars themselves and their professional agents. Most scholars and virtually all scholarly organizations have stood aside to let others develop an online presence for our cultural heritage: libraries, museums, profit and non-profit commercial vendors. Funding agents like NEH , SSHRC, and Mellon have thrown support to individual scholars and small groups of scholars, and they have encouraged new institutional agents like Ithaka, Hastac, SCI, and Bamboo. But while these developments have increased during the past seventeen years—i.e., since the public emergence of the Internet—the scholarly community at large remains shockingly passive.