Several days ago the Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences of the American Council of Learned Societies released a draft of its Our Cultural Commonwealth report. The report identifies the needs and the challenges the humanities and social sciences face in assuring that the developing cyberinfrastructure meets their needs. These fields have not exploited information technologies as effectively as the sciences. No one thing explains the difference. Two factors are the comparative differences in funding and, especially in the humanities, a model of scholarship that is carried out largely in solitude rather than, as is common in the sciences, in collaborative teams.

The report’s summary articulates one set of issues better, I believe, than the more discursive discussion in the body of the report. Four of these are:

• the loss, fragility, and inaccessibility of the cultural record;
• the complexity of the cultural record;
• intellectual property restrictions on the use of the cultural record;
• uncertainty about the future mechanisms, forms, and economics of scholarly publishing and scholarly communication more generally

Sounds like there is an important role for librarians and libraries!

Reports from commissions are, of course, important. But so are stories people can relate to. Release of this report coincides with publication of the August 2006 issue of Smithsonian magazine. In his “Trial by Fire”in that issue David von Drehle, author of Triangle: The Fire that Changed America, tells a story about “the loss, fragility, and inaccessibility of the cultural record.” Only this is a story of the accessibility of part of that record.

Faced with having to tell his publisher that he had neither the promised book nor any of the advance he had been paid, von Drehle felt pressured. Despite the historical significance of this 1911 fire in New York, he could not find key original records from its era. His breakthrough came, not surprisingly, thanks to librarians. He dearly wanted to find a copy of the transcript of the criminal court proceedings from the fire’s aftermath. A citation in an entry in the Dictionary of American Biography noted that records of one of the principal lawyers “are in the N.Y. County Lawyers Assoc.” He googled the NYCLA, spoke with the librarian, and learned the library had no record of attorney Max Steuer’s papers.

Given a tough information challenge, many librarians take ownership for it like a dog with a bone. The NYCLA librarian posted the question to a local law librarians listerv, got a lead from another librarian who had worked at NYCLA, and they found the documents van Drehle needed. Actually, they found two bound volumes of the Triangle trial transcript. The other two, presumably once in NYCLA’s collection, remain missing. But those still at NYCLA, as well as part of a third held at Cornell University, allowed von Drehle to write his book.

Journalists such as von Drehle and scholars in the humanities and social science compile significant collections of research materials, notes, and data sets. These form the foundation on which they erect their published edifices. Many colleges and universities are building institutional repositories to showcase their students’ and faculty’s scholarship. Some repositories accommodate these foundational infohoards so other scholars can use them. The infohoard supporting Triangle: The Fire that Changed America has been digitized by Cornell’s Kheel Center. The Kheel Center offers a Web exhibit about the fire and the complete text of the remaining volumes of the court proceedings.

Librarians are already playing a vital role!