The Task Force's take on one issue, the forms and media scholarship can take, is very heartening. Two of the recommendations in the Executive Summary address this directly:

3. The profession as a whole should develop a more capacious conception of scholarship by rethinking the dominance of the monograph, promoting the scholarly essay, establishing multiple pathways to tenure, and using scholarly portfolios.

4. Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship.

The humanities have embraced new media as something worthy of study and of degree programs, but have been reluctant to confer legitimacy on scholarship produced in those media. Apparently, the field's collective irony alert has failed–until now at least. In a media richculture, it makes no sense–to use a word much favored in recent years in the humanities–to “privilege” the printed text over other media, to confer advantage on the container and disregard the value of its content. Academic libraries have been ahead of humanities scholarship in collecting sound, video, images, and other electronic and non-proint media in support of the humanities. How much richer humanities scholarship promises to be if senior faculty take the Task Force's recommendations to heart. Its report deserves a better reception than the Iraq Study Commission's report has received in the White House! If the senior faculty “recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media” as well as collaborative works, the tech-savvy, next generation of tenure track faculty, raised in a multimedia world, will offer an explosion of creativity in the ways in which they present their research findings. This promises to reinvigorate the study of the humanities and has great potential to engage undergraduates in subjects that allegedly have no practical value.

This will have welcome implications for academic librarians. It will open new opportunities for collaboration with humanities faculty who turn to librarians and educational technologists for assistance and guidance. Librarians and educational technologists can even form partnerships to help senior faculty learn about the role new media can play in humanities scholarship so that these faculty will be able to make truly informed judgments about their younger colleagues' work. That, of course, will require diplomacy, but will be well worth the effort.