>>Trevor Owens: So, I'm going to start out with some remarks, sort of trying to lay out
where we are so far with the definition for the national digital platform, how it's developing,
a bit about some of the awards that we've made, and then invite each of the panelists
to respond and sort of give perspectives from different points of view on how this is developing,
and then over the course of the day, we'll have a series of panels where moderators have
some more groups to discuss issues.
So, I'll take about 5 minutes here to get into this concept.
So, consider the following diverse scenarios; a librarian in Utah develops and shares a
plug in for an open source repository system that's reused in libraries in three other
states.
A curator in New York improves documentation for open source exhibition software used by
staff at museums and libraries around the country.
A network of libraries bans together to develop a common system that makes it easier for other
libraries to provide access to e books, and a non profit organization develops and runs
a series of workshops to equip librarians around the country to install, deploy and
configure open source tools to provide access to digital objects.
In each of these cases, staff are working to solve local needs for their institutions,
communities, but at the same time, they're also contributing directly to regional and
national efforts.
The work at each of these organizations is making use of and contributing to the national
digital platform for libraries and museums.
So, again, thank you to everyone who's joined us, both those in the room and watching via
the webcast, for joining us and helping us to better understand how to catalyze the shared
work we engage in to improve digital capacity and capability for libraries across the country.
So, I'm happy to invite Brett from the National of Humanities, Amy Garmer from the Aspen Institute
Dialogue on Public Libraries and Jim Neal from Columbia to respond and comment on this
definition once I sort of put it together here.
So, again, catalyze improvements in digital capacity.
So, focus for us is a key word.
That's sort of one of the key terms of this whole series of meetings, and we're thrilled
to have you here to help us train the focus of our agency on building this capacity, to
provide every library user in the country with improved access to content, collections
and services.
So, when we get to the national digital platform, we've got a couple layers that I'll discuss.
On a very broad level, we're talking about a way of thinking about what accumulates from
all the digital tools, services, infrastructure and skills libraries and librarians need to
utilize, to meet the needs of their users across the country.
More specifically, it's a priority area in our grant program.
So, again, broadly, it's this way of thinking about all the software applications, the social,
technical infrastructure, the staff expertise that provides every library content, or provides
every library content and services to all users in the United States.
An so, in this vein, the platform isn't an individual thing.
It's not a piece of software, it's not a website, it's the culmination of those things, it's
what they become altogether, and so if we're to zoom out and sort of look at all of these
software tools, the components, the infrastructure, the knowledge required to use and contribute
to that, and you sort of squint a little bit, you can start to see what that national platform
is, and, so, as we increasingly use digital infrastructure to provide access to content,
there are more and more opportunities for collaboration around the tools and services
we use to meet users' needs.
So, it's possible, in this case, for every library in the country, to leverage and benefit
from the work of other libraries, in shared digital services, systems and infrastructure.
So, from this perspective, the foundations of a national digital platform for libraries
and museums already exist in a range of open source software projects and shared services
provided by local, regional and national organizations, and as Maura had noted, over the past 20 years,
we've conducted an enormous amount of research and development around digital libraries,
but much of that has been locally focused or involved small collaborations or resulted
in a range of one off projects that faced significant sustainability challenges, and
as a result, the national digital platform currently exists as a diffuse set of largely
disconnected components.
At last year's convening in New York, a range of experts, much like yourselves, encouraged
IMLS to prioritize improving and better connecting the
most promising digital tools, services, the elements that have the most clear potential
to scale up, and so a theme that came through that discussion was that there's a clear need
to shift away from supporting a range of one off individual projects to focus more on supporting
projects that catalyze action and activity.
In that vein, three weeks ago, we announced the first four awards in this priority area.
Elements of those awards, their national scopes, how they build on and leverage existing successful
projects and programs, how they respond directly to the challenges of scale, and how they focus
on shared capacity and services, responded directly to the issues that were raised at
last year's convening, specifically a grant for the DPLA standpoint on dura-space focuses
on creating a turn key instance of the hydro repository software which can help both the
hubs of DPLA and more broadly the range of different users on the Hydra platform, a grant
to art store and four partner museums to improve the shared shelf platform, to serve as an
open content hub for museums, a grant to Old Dominion University explore scaling up web
archiving and using digital story telling tools to make sense of and provide access
to web archives, and a planning grant to Tuffs University that will bring together experts
from disability services with librarians and IT professionals to explore developing a shared
repository for accessible course materials.
The challenge to our diverse national community of libraries and librarians is to identify
and articulate common goals and priorities for the near term.
To that end, today and going forward, we ask the community, what's working well and what
needs to move to the next level?
What's missing or underdeveloped in our distributed digital infrastructure?
What must happen to improve how all of those components fit together and work with other
platforms?
How do we ensure that librarians across the country are equipped to make the best use
of and to contribute to the development of those components to meet the needs of their
communities?
I'm excited to pose these questions to those convened here today, both in person and via
the webcast.
We need you to weigh in and articulate what the key near term priorities should be as
a focus across this platform.
I'm looking forward to learning together as we continue to iteratively identify how to
improve our work.
Thank you.
So, we can sort of move down the table to begin with.
Brett.
>>Brett Bobley: Alright, thank you, Trevor.
First, let me just give my kudos to you guys at IMLS.
You know, we had a meeting at the New York Public Library that you guys invited me to
about a year ago, and we started talking about this idea of a national digital platform,
and one of the things on the table was that IMLS was really going to restructure its grant
programs and try to meet the requirements of the field, and honestly, you go to a lot
of meetings where people talk about doing a lot of changes, but you guys actually did
it, and I mean that.
You guys have seriously, I work for the federal government, and sometimes, it takes a really,
really, really long time to change things, and you guys, within one year, made some pretty
dramatic changes to your NLG Program to try to focus in on this National Digital Platform,
so I applaud you for that.
I think that as a funder myself, it's interesting to me, when I look at the list of the people
who are in the room, who are attending, a significant portion, probably more than half
the people in the room are people at my agency also works with or funds and etc., and that,
I think, raises an important point that I wanted to make about funding the national
digital platform.
It's that I really urge funders, we need to do a better job working together to ensure
that we are developing the national digital platform in a unified fashion.
I mean, I'll give you an example.
In about a week, Mary Flanagan, who will be talking later, is hosting a terrific multi
day workshop on crowd sourcing for libraries and museums and other organizations, and this
particular event was co funded by IMLS and NEH and the Sloan Foundation.
The three of us got together and worked it out and came up with what we think is a terrific
program that Mary and her team, along with the University of Maryland, are doing next
week, but the point is that, honestly, a year or two ago, that probably wouldn't have happened.
A year or two ago, IMLS would have funded something to do with crowd sourcing and then
NEH would have funded some completely different event, and the Sloan Foundation would have
done some other completely different event and we would have heard, oh, that's really
funny, I heard you guys did something on crowd sourcing as well and there wouldn't have been
any coordination.
I think in order to build this national digital platform, we as funders need to be cognizant
of the fact, there's a limited amount of dollars out there, and we can't keep funding silos.
We need to work with one another and figure out, hey, you know, Trevor, what are you guys
funding?
What are you up to?
What do we need to do?
When we get in grant applications, we need to stop funding siloed projects.
If an organizational library comes to me and wants to fund a project, and it might be a
really cool project, and maybe 10 years ago, that would have been enough, but if the project
is not trying to take the content that they're developing and make it part of a national
digital platform, that shouldn't be funded.
We really need to be cognizant of that.
We need to direct these dollars in a way to have the maximum positive impact for the field,
and that is a big change, and it is a lot more work for us funders to talk to one another
and do that kind of stuff, but I can tell you that I'm on the phone with other funders
now more and more, I mean, I probably talk to Trevor two or three times a week and folks
at Mellon and other organizations, so I really think it's critical that we see how OCLC and
ALA and AAS and DLF and Clear and all these important organizations that are involved
in the library field, how can we work together to ensure that, we all have kind of a shared
vision of the national digital platform, and we can all support aspects of it using the
mechanisms, the support or grant mechanisms that we have in place already today.
Thanks.
>>Amy Garmer: So, I'm going to follow Brett by talking a little bit more about what is
happening at the local level, with local libraries.
The Aspen Institute project, which has been going for two years now, has had a very specific
focus on public libraries, and because public libraries are so quintessentially local and
community based, we've spent a lot of time looking at how the public library provides
a platform for its local community, but in that discussion, recognized, in an age when
networks are really the dominant form of organization, and that's where communities are really built
now, that we needed to consider how these networks scale up and connect, because we
know that information and knowledge culture flows everywhere beyond boundaries over these
networks.
So, in the work that we've done, we've spent a lot of time looking at how public libraries,
talking to public libraries about how they can leverage their three critical assets of
people, place and platform, and when we think about that platform and building out the platform
for learning and creativity and innovation in the community, you know, you realize in
those conversations that there's a grander scale for library cooperation there, that
it's, in serving the community, you need to be connected into other networks and on to
a bigger, broader platform if you're going to provide what your community needs.
So, I think to that end, we spent a lot of time looking at this question of what is emerging
as a national digital platform.
I think I've got a quote in our report of Maura saying what she said earlier, we said
atop 20 years of experiments and work and looking at building the elements of the national
digital platform, how do we now bring it all together.
I think at the local level, what's really challenging for local librarians and their
communities is understanding what is uniquely local and how to then think about participating
in something that's national or regional without losing that local identity within the public
library.
So, I think that one of the bigger challenges for public libraries in looking at participation
in a national digital platform, even beyond the issues of funding and sustainability,
is a sense of cultural identity and navigating what a local library is when it becomes part
of a broader national digital platform.
Within the work that we've done, some of the opportunities for a national digital platform
in particular, and I think Trevor eluded to some of this too, is the opportunity to have
people find others across the platform who are working toward common ends, where there's
a need for specialization and domain expertise, you're not going to have that in every community.
At the local level and local library, you can provide the level of specialization and
domain expertise across any number of disciplines and knowledge sets by participating in a national
platform.
So, I think, essentially, there's an argument to be made.
When we've engaged with local librarians, it's a broad spectrum.
Some are very excited about the possibly of participating in a national platform and thinking
about how they can help connect to and create it, others are very weary of losing that local
control, so I would just give a shout out to thinking about the culture and the kinds
of arguments that go, that need to seep down to where the library sees itself at its most
local levels.
To that end, to what Brett was saying about identifying, I would think of them as allies,
whether it's funders in the case of the local level of community foundations who are in
a position to work with local public libraries, there are shared goals and missions that a
national digital platform can serve across, not just the libraries and cultural institutions
and knowledge institutions that we're talking about, and I think that there's an opportunity
to pull together a broader coalition, starting in communities, with local public libraries
reaching out to some of the other community partners, whether they're in government or
community foundations or other organizations.
I think in the work that we're doing, what's really pivotal is the state role as a mediator
between the local and what's happening at the national level, so I look forward to hearing
and seeing more about what that state role is, and then, finally, just a real quick plug,
I think the FCC gave public libraries a really wonderful opportunity in expanding the e rate
funding as much as they did with their e rate reform, and there's this wonderful window
of opportunity right now for local communities to look at how to tap into that, access that,
to build out what they need at the local level and what we need as part of the national digital
platform.
Thanks.
>>Jim Neal: Thank you.
So, let me start with my Marxist Leninist mantra.
Yes.
Ideas have no value unless they are translated into action.
One year ago tomorrow, we met as a summit at New York Public Library, and we came up
with, I think, five basic directions.
As Brett and Trevor have noted, how do we move from scattered institutional investments
and siloed projects to national programs?
And the new investments are taking us in that direction.
Two: how do we expand our understanding of digital content at large scale to embrace
curation, discovery, use and preservation?
And preservation, and preservation of digital content?
How do we build tools that are ubiquitous, iterative, transparent and integrated?
How do we build infrastructure at global scale and create public/private partnerships with
publishers?
Where are they?
Media companies.
Where are they?
Search engines and social media to advance our shared digital platform objectives?
And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, are libraries recruiting, developing and retaining
the diverse professional staff who can lead us in practice and performance?
Let me suggest eight contexts for our discussions today.
The global context: how does the national digital platform integrate internationally?
We need to give attention to that.
The policy context; we are losing the policy wars.
We need new policy leadership.
We should not allow licensing to displace user supportive policies.
This is a great area of concern, and as IMLS invests in digital content through libraries,
we need to be sensitive to those policy priorities.
The preservation context: we have a disaster in the making.
Published e materials are not being consistently and routinely preserved, and the waves of
born digital content are being lost every second of every day.
The diversity context: we need an affirmative action for inclusion of diverse content and
diverse perspectives on the national digital platform.
We are creating classes of access, communities that have money, communities that have political
power, communities that have good lawyers are getting more and better access than poorer
communities, and where is the diversity participating in our discussion today?
We need to be sensitive to the teaching and learning context and integrate educators into
our conversation.
We need to be sensitive to the scholar communication context and integrate researchers into our
conversation.
We need to set aside the kumbaya of the past, the period of polygamy, where we seem to be
willing to couple with anyone, anytime and really focus on more systemic, radical collaboration,
in terms of how we select and develop partnerships and lastly, we need to consider the national
leadership context.
How do things in organizations like ALA and other national associations, OCLC, the Library
of Congress and NERA, what is their role in helping us to define and advance the national
digital platform?
So, I'm hoping we'll keep these ideas and these observations in mind as we work over
the course of the day.
>>Trevor Owens: Thank you.
We now have, if I'm reading my schedule right, about 20 minutes of time for comments, questions
from the audience that we, the panel and I, can then respond to.
The whole concept of the day is we're hoping to have a significant amount of time for discussion,
comment and conversation after each of the panels.
When you do, a reminder again that when you do comment, please make sure you have one
of the mics, so just raise your hand and we'll get you a mic, and then say your name and
what organization you're here from so that people on the webcast have context as well.
>>Lucy Barber: Hi.
I’m Lucy Barber.
I'm here partly because I'm from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission,
which is the grant funding arm of the national archives, but I did want to call out a little
bit that Trevor kept using the word librarian, and there are a few people out in the twittersphere
and other places that are archivists, and I also think, sorry, and I really appreciated
your comment though, that the platform isn't just, you know, what you see, but all the
pieces that make up for it, but I know that I've been contemplating, in terms of some
of the types of projects that we support over at the Commission, and as much as I want to
get out of the silo nature of them, they do pose some new challenges that are different
in some ways in terms of how I would ideally like them presented than so far what I've
seen possible in terms of what's on, like, DPLA or something like that, just in the way
that electronic records projects sometimes need a more detailed database structure than
what an e book would need, and, so, that's one of the challenges.
We want stuff up there, we want stuff that's accessible, but if we try to simplify things
and approach the format, if we go for the comment in the universal, we might lose the
unique and precious of certain styles of data and materials.
Like, I'm sponsoring the George Washington financial papers right now, and they're doing
a, you know, going to come out as a free digital edition, people are going to download the
data from and be able to do analysis of what he bought and how many, you know, cool, how
much he spent on different things.
Now, that's a very specific type of project, and it's got to be siloed, but I don't know
how to solve that yet until we build lots of them together.
So, that's my, you know, I'm heart torn, but, mostly, I want you to include archival projects,
because I already know, my boss, David Ferriero is showing up later, and he’s contributing
lots of material to DPLA and loves to do that.
So, I don't know if you have thoughts on that, material that's hard to fit.
>>Trevor Owens: Yeah, I think I would jump in on that.
So, as Maura mentioned, libraries, museums and archives are in our purview, and I think
are definitely involved in this, and I guess my initial comment, and then I'll be happy
to hear from the panel as well, on the issue of, well, so, I think this is why it's important
that there isn't one mega system, right?
This isn't, like, the one spot where everything goes and that there will always be sort of
an R and D element to exploring different content types and the best ways to work with
those, but at the same time, there's a, I think, a massive power from integrating those
and figuring out how to better make things discoverable across these different systems,
so in the same way that it's, you know, there are going to be siloed projects, but surfacing
elements of them are working to have more common ways to work across those is, I think,
a great thing to strive for.
>>Jim Neal: I think that archives and archivists are absolutely central to the conversations
we're having here, and it's our oversight for not embracing that in our language, and
we need to be sensitive to that over the course of the day.
I want to sort of reference the digital preservation piece of this, because as you know, more and
more of the individual papers and the organizational records and the participation of our world
in social media challenges us in very interesting ways in how we're going to preserve and carry
forward that content, but we just don't carry forward the content, obviously, we must carry
forward the functionality, and a lot of these projects have very important specialized tools
that enable people to probe and ask questions and reach really important conclusions, and,
so, we need to be sensitive to that long term preservation functionality requirement that
we have as well as the content.
>> SPEAKER: Is it my turn?
Do you want to say something, Brett?
>>Brett Bobley: To answer Lucy's question one more time, sorry, I think, I agree with
you, obviously, there are some projects that are more boutique y, but we need to be careful
not to get into the trap.
I mean, as a grantor, I can tell you, I get tons of applications from people who say that
their project is a special snowflake that's different than all other snowflakes, and I
think it's important that we not, I mean, the easy way out is to say, oh, you're right,
that is special, so you build your silo over there.
I think every project should be thinking about how what they do fits in with the community.
It doesn't mean that a project should be dumbed down because, you know, they're doing something
unique or interesting, but there are still ways for them to use national preservation
networks, for them to use national discovery networks, even if the project that they're
building has unique data or unique content types.
There may be ways for them to work with other organizations at the national level that are
doing similar content types.
So, what I'm getting at is we don't want to take the easy way out.
We really want everyone to be thinking about how what they're doing can be done in a broad
fashion and can be plugged into this digital infrastructure in some reasonable fashion.
>> SPEAKER: Vicky.
>>Vicky Rice: Hi.
I'm Vicky Rice from Stanford University, and I'm sorry I missed last year's meeting.
It sounds like it broke really fabulous, new ground, and I wanted to follow up on Jim's
plea on the Marxist Leninist, which is just to say that everything, pretty much, aside
from the materials that we're digitizing, which often end up on the web, most everything
now is up on the web, and I've been doing digital preservation for nearly 20 years and
have been collecting it from the web, and it is far too big a job for even the organizations
that are represented here in this room.
It is just absolutely huge, and, so, if I had a wish or a plea, it would be for us to
work on tools that made it so that we could interoperate among the web tools that are
doing ingest and preservation and dissemination and management, and to make those tools not
only interoperate, but to make them so easy to use that we can, to be blunt, power to
the people, and that's my say.
>>Jim Neal: Yeah, there's an adage that says every snowflake in an avalanche pleads not
guilty, and the tsunami of snowflakes, I'm glad that Cliff is laughing, it's clear that
we've got this tsunami that we, that institutional solutions are not the right approach, and
we don't seem to have the wear with all to build strategies, not just around web content,
and we thank Brewster for his leadership and support in helping us take care of that stuff,
but there's so much other things, whether it be the archival materials that are born
digital, whether it be the social media, whether it be the research data that my faculty and
researchers are producing, it's just an extraordinary challenge, and I hope we can give attention
to it in our work.
>> SPEAKER: So, we have a question from Brewster, and then we'll have Allen from ALA.
>> SPEAKER: Inspiring.
I'm trying to, I was trying to just write notes, and sort of the summary from my perspective
of what was just said, 20 years of experiments, now it's time to bring it all together.
Platform.
Scale.
Massive power to integrate.
If people request funding for digital work that does not feed into the national digital
platform, the NEH will not fund it.
A word that hasn't been used but probably would have been used five years ago is synergy.
Whenever I hear platform, it sort of, like, oh, I remember that word.
It was used by a very famous software company called Microsoft about having its operating
system be the platform.
So, it's a time consolidation, but what are we consolidating into?
We're talking about feeding our materials that have been maintained and a diverse set
of organizations, archives, libraries into a common platform and consolidating navigation
therefore and leveraging each other to have, basically, increased access points, and my
being from the tech field, I certainly know the power of winner takes all and what happens
when you have one platform rule them all.
The Internet though has evolved into some other mottos that have been kind of interesting
that we might want to take seriously going forward in this.
Aiguille, which means it's not top down, waterfall, it's all going to be designed and you get
to implement your piece ideas, and the motto of the Internet founders was we believe in
rough consensus and running code.
That may be different from kind of what I'm hearing so far, and it might be useful.
A good test might be to think in your heads, at the end of the day, after this program
and platform is put in place and funding is coordinated and consolidated, how many independent
libraries and archives will there be?
What does it mean to be an independent library, archive or museum in this world?
Which is increasingly becoming digital.
So, I'm not trying to be Luddite here.
I think of myself as very much from the tech world, and I love the diversity of the library
community.
How do we make all of this happen?
As one other participant said here, and it's not the person you'd imagine, lots of copies
keep stuff open.
I think there's going to be issues around public policy, issues around copyright in
particular, and if these are gone at in ways that are top down, I think that we may end
up with laws we will regret.
So, the big, the elephant in the room is the modern materials that are in copyright, and
how do we evolve and approach towards dealing with these materials in a way that we end
up with something that's not centrally controlled.
Thank you.
>>Trevor Owens: Does anyone want to respond first to that?
>>Jim Neal: Yeah, I agree with Brewster.
I think sometimes in the effort to make progress, we over consolidate and lose the importance
of initiative and innovation.
There's a sentence in the book, Education of Henry Adams, that says order breeds habit
while chaos breeds life, and I think we want to make sure that our national digital platform
is a reflection of life, and if it means that there's a certain amount of chaos that's built
into that, so be it, because it'll be a better place to work and to get things done.
>>Trevor Owens: Amy, I think, that fits very well some of what you were talking about with
local libraries, sort of how the connection’s there.
>>Amy Garmer: Yeah, and the word that came to my mind after Brewster was speaking was
governance, that, you know, you can talk about the platform thinking, you can talk about
platform funding, but, you know, once you start doing all that and getting it together,
how is it going to be governed, and, you know, we do have a number of, you know, successful,
long successful period with the multi stakeholder approach that has governed the Internet and
the general consensus and the structure of the governing bodies, none of which seems
to have, you know, absolute control over anything, although perhaps some of the domain name stuff
has gotten there, but I think that as this work moves forward and as IMLS and its allies
move forward with this, that's going to have to be a key part of the conversation.
>>Brett Bobley: I think Brewster raises a good point with the word platform.
It's maybe not the best word in this case.
I don't think of the national digital platform as anything monolithic.
Maybe a better word would be national digital environment or something like that.
I think it's about getting individual projects to think about not just themselves but how
they fit into a wider sort of infrastructure, you know, a wider environment and how their
materials can be best shared and preserved in sort of a national and international scale.
It's really, I think, about getting people to think about it from that perspective rather
than just building individually.
I think that, certainly at the NEH, I think we come from tradition, for example, of funding,
like, books, you know monographs, where I think that most individual authors tend to
think about, well, I'm just worried about my book, because the library infrastructure
that makes that book shareable is something that was outside their control, you know,
but I think that when you're building a digital project today, you do need to think about
how it's going to interoperate with the rest of the world and ensure that it gets out there,
and I think that's really, at its heart, what this platform is about, is thinking about
it beyond just the scope of your individual project.
>>Trevor Owens: I'd add on to that too, it's not just about sort of shared ways of doing
access, but I think Archive It a great example of a tool that enables libraries to collect,
and to sort of carry out that element or mission and then to share those collects, so I think
this is still very much sort of trying to build common tools that support all of the
institutions in their missions, to collect, to provide access, to provide services, and
so the more that we can put this together, but you're right, not sort of in a monolithic
sense.
Allen, you had a question or a comment?
>>Allen: Sure.
Thank you.
Allen in ALA.
First, I just want to thank IMLS for the national digital platform.
Speaking from a policy advocate’s point of view, it's kind of, from a national point
of view, what do you advocate for, and so this is an important construct for the whole
community.
So, first of all, it's incumbent upon all of us to support it, so, you know, what can
we do?
One is to create momentum, so you can blog about it, you can write articles about it,
talk about it in your presentations at conferences and so on, right?
There is this kind of increasing legitimacy from the field that this is a real thing and
it's really important to us, and therefore, it should be supported, in particular by Congress.
As Maura mentioned, it's in President Obama's FY 2016 budget, and so we need to create that
support, that this is actually important, for libraries, for archives and for the whole
country.
I just want to point out that next week is actually national library legislative day,
and so there's an opportunity to help demonstrate that support, that this is really important
and it's a really good hook for us, that, you know, we have something specific we can
advocate for.
So, I just want to thank IMLS for taking that initiative during the past year.
The other comment is something Brewster mentioned about copyright, and I just want to mention
that this morning, there's a new coalition on copyright that was just launched called
Re Create, and it includes some of the major players in Washington such as the Consumer
Electronics Association and Electronic Frontier Foundation and public knowledge, and also
ALA and the Association of Research Libraries are founding members.
There are ten founding members, and so, it's going in the direction of, you know, user
rights and what the general public needs in terms of managing and using digital content,
and, so, it's a step in that direction, but, obviously, there's a lot more to be done.
Thanks.
>>Trevor Owens: Thank you.
If there are any reactions or, we have a hand in the back for a microphone to, and then
we're just about at time.
Oh okay, we've got two question/comments.
>>Karen Ann Mulsen: It's not a direct comment.
I didn't know if mentored else actually had another.
Okay, I just wanted to point out, oh, hi, my name's Karen Ann Mulsen.
I'm from AV Preserve.
We are a consulting firm, so we get to work with a lot of different organizations, very
diverse organizations, and while I very much applaud breaking down the silos, I think this
is extremely important, it's what we do in most of our work, but we're focusing on silos
internally at organizations, and I think we have to keep in mind that most of these organizations
that we're talking about potentially funding really exist as many, many, many silos within
those organizations.
If we can't break those down, how are we going to, you know, break down these regional and
national silos?
I think we need to not overlook that need, because my concern is that what we end up
doing is taking slivers and pieces of each institution that's participating, and they
get to join in, where the rest kind of get left behind.
So, if leadership at libraries and museums and archives are only focused on, you know,
we need to get with IMLS national digital platform, and oh my gosh, we're never going
to get funding any other way, are they going to be leaving behind parts of their organization
which are struggling, are they going to be not focusing on creating enterprises that
really manage their data as these organizations, you know, increasingly become managers of
large scale data sets.
So, I don't know if there's a role for IMLS or NEH or other funders to play in that, but
I think we need to not lose sight of that.
>>Trevor Owens: Thank you.
We'll take the other comment in the back and then we'll have a moment or two.
>>Kim Kristy: Hi.
I'm Kim Kristy from Washington State University and the Mukadu project director, funded by
both IMLS and NEH, so thank you.
I know we're focusing on the platform and the digital.
I also want to focus on the national part and remind us that we do have 566 federally
recognized tribes within nations within the nation, and we've brought up copyright, we
brought up content, and some of that content we need to pay attention to that is in the
public domain or are copyright by third party owners is historically owned by other people,
and, so, I just want to bring the conversation, also, local communities, we can focus on how
do we serve tribal archives, libraries and museums as sovereign nations, also funneling
their content in but having different concerns, how might we be aware of those, and I appreciate
Trevor and Brett making sure that we understand that the platform's not monolithic.
So, that's just more comment.
Thank you.
>>Trevor Owens: Thank you.
Great.
So, we're at, or a moment over time, so I wanted to thank everyone on the panel for
participating and everyone already in the conversation, and we'll have a moment to switch
out, but I think we move straight into our next panel.
So, Tom Scheinfeldt, if you can come up, you're the host, and then…
(Applause.)