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Some projects, however, cannot be supported entirely by these low-cost measures. Perhaps they have a scale of hundreds of thousands or millions of documents, or technical infrastructures that move beyond the garden-variety website. What about ambitious digital projects that do not have access to the purses available to large editorial projects like the Papers of George Washington ? What if Civil War Washington grows, through sheer grit and gift labor, into a critical resource for historians, literary scholars, and other researchers? What if the project needs a small, dedicated staff or a more substantial infrastructure (with its associated costs)?

The strategic planners of Ithaka point to value creation as the key: “In our opinion, delivering impact is the key factor in the potential for achieving long-term sustainability; only high impact and highly useful materials will draw the financial support from beneficiaries needed for long-term success.” Guthrie et al., “Sustainability and Revenue Models,” 5. I agree, but I once posited this idea to a venture capitalist. “Sustainable business models don’t come from the value of goods,” he replied matter-of-factly. “They come from the scarcity of goods that have value.” Although I am a strong supporter of open access and open source, we have clearly set ourselves a nearly Sisyphean task by pushing the free and open while prospecting around for revenue. Most of the literature about sustainability fails to note that most commercial enterprises fail, even with the tremendous advantage of charging for their products. Moreover, while the idea of achieving impact and then a business model sounds good, we need to recognize that much of humanities scholarship is about the esoteric. The universe of stakeholders for some fields may be miniscule, making the ability to garner donations or have libraries subscribe to every academic resource, especially in a recession, even more implausible.

The role of funders is often compared to venture capitalists. But the comparison is imperfect at best. Venture capitalists may indeed, like funders of open academic resources, provide “seed funding,” but VCs also often put in additional capital, in increasingly large amounts (i.e., Series A, B, and C funding), to support sustained operations and growth. They also provide critical connections for business deals, marketing, and IPOs, sometimes orchestrating an acquisition themselves. There are no equivalents to these injections of capital, services, or “exits” in the digital humanities. Ithaka does encourage mergers and acquisitions among digital academic resources, but the incentive structure of the university is perversely opposite that of commercial entrepreneurs: if your project is “acquired,” not only do you lose oversight of the resource, you also lose credit for it in the long term. Worse: you’re not a sudden millionaire.

At an effective rate of at least $1 million per staffer, endowments are unrealistic for most projects, and tilt the digital humanities playing field unhealthily toward institutions with established fundraising prowess. (I was delighted to see, however, that the Whitman Archive had achieved at least an initial fundraising goal to support editorial functions.) Advertising and corporate sponsorships, also proposed by Ithaka, can cloud the all-important perception of the resource I have already explored. By far the most likely path to fiscal success is the way that venture capitalist suggested: make your resource scarce and charge for it. That is, sacrifice the ideal of open access on the altar of sustainability. We need more discussion about this tension, and creative ways out of it.

A related question is the leadership of these projects. As one Ithaka report notes, “Running a start-up”—what these bigger digital projects effectively become—“is a full-time job and requires full-time leadership. The mode of principal investigators, in which they divide their time between overseeing a variety of research grants, teaching courses, and other responsibilities, is not conducive to entrepreneurial success.” Guthrie et al., “Sustainability and Revenue Models,” 7.The author would like to thank Tom Scheinfeldt for his helpful comments on a draft of this paper. The report is indeed correct that PIs need to operate like CEOs, not professors, being unabashedly competitive with other resources and sublimating weak academic thoughtfulness in the hardheaded effort to find revenue. The report recommends that if professors can’t do this, they need to hire others. But where do these magical entrepreneurs-in-residence come from, and who maintains them between projects? I happen to know several at the Center for History and New Media, critical research faculty with the technical know-how, the intellect, and the energy to make complex digital projects succeed. Sustaining them is, unsurprisingly, my top priority.

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Source:  OpenStax, Online humanities scholarship: the shape of things to come. OpenStax CNX. May 08, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11199/1.1
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