Introduction

The NII is at the center of an American information revolution that will profoundly affect the ways in which we communicate, learn, work, and govern ourselves. The nature of a democratic society requires an educated, and informed, citizenry. Information is not only a keystone of democracy but also one of the nation’s most critical economic resources. Information is an educational, research, and creative asset accumulated by past generations, invested for the future. Electronic technologies have the potential to transform information from a scarce, inequitably distributed and fragmented commodity into a true public good, one that is virtually inexhaustible as well as perpetually renewed and expanded.

Humanities and arts computing has significant contributions to make, not only to the content of the NII, but also to advances in technology that will drive its development. The technological research and investment required to bring the complex resources of the humanities and arts into digital form and to make them accessible would contribute profoundly to the most difficult technological challenges of our age: machine understanding, machine vision and natural language processing. The creation of a fully interactive and exploratory environment essential for the arts and humanities to thrive would transform the NII from a link between computers to a connection between people.

Undercapitalization of the impressive array of exciting projects already underway, and technological barriers that require concerted research, are impairing the ability of these communities to meet the challenges and realize fully their contribution to the dawning electronic age. A national policy that encourages humanities and arts endeavors will allow for cultural heritage information to contribute toward the promises of the NII and enable the scientific and engineering communities to reap the benefits of research on humanities-driven technology problems.

Public Benefits of the Humanities and the Arts in an Information Age

Reshaping humanities and arts information for distribution over electronic networks can provide many dividends, among them the following:

• Enriching a sense of community through active participation in a networked environment.
• Improving the quality of teaching, and the learning of critical thinking, visual literacy, and analytical skills.
• Fostering intellectual and artistic collaborations that will result in new resources in the arts and humanities.
• Preserving the full complexities and quality of cultural information for the use of future generations while making it accessible to more people today.

If the NII were to offer access to everything found in the nation’s libraries, museums, theaters, auditoriums, and archives, it could help dissolve the boundaries that now separate communities, social classes, people of different economic levels, the highly educated and the broad public, and the peoples of different nations. Networks and new multimedia formats for information can reverse current inequities in access to resources. Some resources that broaden such access already exist, such as these:

 

• The Global Jukebox, a multimedia database that provides audio, video and textual information on international music, dance and cultural traditions across time and geography. The Global Jukebox, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), among others, provides a research and teaching resource for anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, dance and theater historians, and sociologists as well as for choreographers, composers and other creative artists.
• Save Outdoor Sculpture (SOS), a national inventory effort to catalog outdoor works of public art, jointly sponsored by the National Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Property.
• The Making of America: 1860-1960, a project initiated by Cornell University to preserve a significant record of our national heritage as digital images and to make those materials available on the Internet.
• Variations, a project at Indiana University’s Music Library, that provides an online listing of music resources worldwide, and also serves as a testbed for the application of emerging technology to the distribution of digital audio and full-motion video across networks.
• The Perseus project, which brings the world of Greek classical antiquity to the public’s fingertips through images, literary texts, historic documents and maps, published on interactive compact disc (CD-ROM) and videodisc by Yale University Press.

Electronic networks are unparalleled teaching tools, making research findings, educational materials and original sources available to any teacher and any student. Examples of just a few of the projects currently online and in development demonstrate this potential:

 

• The National Geographic Society’s Kids Network provides students in grades 4 through 6 an opportunity to participate in a telecommunications-based science and geography curriculum where they can investigate new ideas and exchange information with students around the world. This network allows students in all 50 states and 38 countries to collect information and draw conclusions from data exchanged electronically.
• Direction Paris and Dans le Quartier St. Gervais, housed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory in the Humanities in the Department of Humanities and the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives, are multimedia interactive language teaching programs.
• The American Founding Fathers Project and the Packard Humanities Institute are digitizing the unedited manuscripts of Franklin, Adams, Washington, Madison and Jefferson to produce a CD-ROM that will be distributed to public libraries.
• The Cleopatra Project, being developed by the Art Institute of Chicago on CD-ROM, will relate objects through an information matrix and high-resolution images. This multidimensional teaching resource will have the capacity to view multiple sides and details of objects and connect the works to related illustrations of maps, photographs and other illustrations.

Networks can facilitate artistic or scholarly collaboration, lowering the barriers posed by geography and specialization. Some examples are interactive fiction writing done in Storyspace, or the collaborative forum for poets provided by Poet-L. The electronic highway has created new “virtual” public spaces, such as the bulletin board dialogues that PacerForum makes possible, where communication, debate, exhibitions and other novel forms of electronic interaction occur.

Interpretation, discovery and experimentation in the arts and humanities can be enormously quickened and expanded by electronic networks. Conference papers, for example, become accessible immediately, instead of many months after the event. Publishers already use the Internet to circulate electronic catalogs of new titles. University presses have begun experimenting with the electronic distribution of scholarly journals, and trade publishers are investigating the custom-tailoring of classroom texts for specific audiences. Examples of specific projects in this area are the following:

 

• H-NET, an international initiative, is a collection of lists of affinity groups (listservs) specifically for historians that is operated on a voluntary basis by scholars in the United States, Canada, Australia and Italy. With the financial support of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago, H-NET sponsors 37 electronic scholarly discussion groups with a rapidly expanding list of more than 10,000 subscribers who communicate research, teaching methods, analytical approaches and shared interests. Each list features topical dialogues, and publishes book reviews, job announcements, syllabi, bibliographies, guides to online library catalogs and archives, and reports on new software, data sets and CD-ROMs.
• Pre-press networks in philosophy, economics, communications and philology provide early access to scholarly conference papers.
• Humanist is the longest-running listserv for humanities scholars, while Arts Wire offers a range of services to artists and arts organizations.
• TULIP, an acronym for The University Licensing Project, is a three-year project being conducted by Elsevier Science Publishers and nine university library systems. It provides online versions of all project titles and a total of 42 serial titles to review. The information in this project will be used to answer technical, service and marketing questions relating to the creation, delivery and use of current, core science journals in online form.

Projects such as the MicroGallery of the National Gallery (London), distributed on CD-ROM, demonstrate that the entire holdings of museums and archives — not merely what can be displayed at any one moment — could be available as both visual and text catalogs. In addition, records referring to works, artifacts and texts now physically scattered in separate collections can be brought together in electronic databases, as is being done in the following projects:

 

• The Leonard Bernstein Archives Project, undertaken by the Library of Congress, a consortium of institutions across the country, and the Leonard Bernstein estate, to digitize electronic facsimiles of letters, scores, books and audio recordings that constitute the archive of this composer, musician and educator.
• The Census of Antique Art and Architecture Known to the Renaissance, an electronic archive that reconstitutes Renaissance sketchbooks, texts and drawings dispersed in museums and libraries around the world.
• The Global Jewish Database, an online database containing a collection of material for scholars of Jewish history and culture.
• The Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML), an evolving database, centered at Indiana University-Bloomington, that will eventually contain the entire corpus of Latin music theory written during the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance.
• The Provenance Documentation Collaborative, a consortium that has amassed inventories and sales records of works of art from European archives and auction catalogs.

These projects, and the many others like them, form the building blocks of national data sets in the humanities and arts (see pp. 16, 36). What is missing is the greater cooperation, both national and international, needed to avoid duplication of effort and to ensure that resources can be adapted to global networks. Such coordination stands to improve not only the understanding of American culture in foreign countries, but also Americans’ appreciation of their own cultural heritages.

Attention to the automation of these resources into national data sets could open new markets for America’s cultural wealth. The United States holds masterpieces from many civilizations and societies as well as the unique riches of Native American artifacts. The worldwide market for cultural heritage information is, on balance, a trade asset to the U.S. Networked information also generates a positive synergy; the more people have access to it, the more people will use it and find new uses for it, thus attracting more users. In addition, stimulated demand will lower costs.

Humanities and arts computing also has a unique contribution to make to the technical achievements of the NII. The technical challenges posed by assembling cultural heritage information in electronic form will offer complexities of a different order from the sciences.

If the potential benefits of the information revolution are to be realized, the humanities and the arts will need to make vital contributions. At the moment, financial under-capitalization, technological underdevelopment, and political neglect combine to hinder their doing so. The sections that follow describe the specific steps that must be taken if the humanities and arts are to occupy their rightful place on the information highway.

 

Necessary Components of a Humanities and Arts

Information Infrastructure

 

The NII Agenda for Action identified the following five basic components of a national information infrastructure (NII Agenda for Action, September 15, 1993, p. 5):

• The physical facilities used to transmit, process, display and store data (voice, text, images).
• The information itself, in the form of scientific, scholarly or business databases, video programming, images, sound recordings, library archives and other media.
• The software programs (also known as applications) that allows users to access, manipulate, organize and digest proliferating masses of information.
• The network standards and transmission codes that allow networks to connect with each other, and that also ensure reliability, user privacy and the security of information.
• The people who create the information, develop applications and services, construct facilities and train others.

These components, or requirements, apply to all participants in the information infrastructure, whether in the sciences or the arts and humanities, whether in manufacturing, health care or electronic commerce. The section that follows assesses the current progress made by humanities and arts computing in these five areas (making allowances for the great disparities that currently exist among institutions, disciplines and individuals in these fields).

Physical Facilities

University- and college-based programs in the humanities and arts have invested substantially in acquiring and installing all kinds of computer equipment. Faculty offices usually have a desktop workstation as virtually standard equipment (though not necessarily connected to the Internet); students typically have access to computer labs and computerized library catalogs, perhaps from their dormitory rooms. Together, these university-based investments in equipment have laid a basic, if low-powered, foundation of facilities for an information infrastructure serving the humanities and the arts.

Nevertheless, the promise of universal access is far from a reality. While the investment in physical facilities has been significant, many inequities exist, both between campuses and within any given campus. These gaps are likely to continue, if not worsen, as technological improvements in the quality and multimedia capabilities of equipment make access to more than basic facilities necessary. Now, as technological advances improve capacity, expand applications and link computers to other forms of communication, universities and colleges will need to continue to upgrade their physical facilities. Indeed, the acquisition, maintenance and upgrading of physical computing facilities will be particularly crucial for the arts and humanities, where the complex form of such information requires sophisticated equipment and technical improvements in visual, audio and text representation.

In addition, what has been missing until very recently is the consciousness of the paramount importance of interconnectivity: each college, university and university system has proceeded independently in acquiring its computer facilities and equipment, which were operated primarily on a stand-alone basis. Now, in the age of networks, institutions of higher education face a set of “last mile” or even “last foot” interconnectivity problems: that is, while a campus, or a library, or a single department may have the necessary equipment or network connection, not all faculty, administrators or students will necessarily have full access to these resources. In an era of constrained budgets, many institutions of higher education will be hard pressed to find the financial resources to meet these evolving needs.

Cultural institutions outside higher education often lack the most basic computer facilities. By contrast, university-affiliated museums, libraries, arts centers, and archives can take advantage of their institution’s investments in information facilities and access to networks. For example, according to the Museum Computer Network (MCN), it is not uncommon for museums to regard non-administrative computing facilities as unnecessary unless funded by outside grants or required to meet a specific project or legal need. As a consequence, many museums have not established institutional computing facilities (SPECTRA, Vol. 21, No. 4). While exhibition planners could use interactive multimedia tools to reach and engage more museum visitors, and provide better resource materials for scholarship and classroom use, the necessary equipment is likely to be beyond the means of most such institutions.

Even for fully automated cultural institutions, interconnection to the Internet may be unavailable or costly if acquired through commercial service providers. Indeed, such large museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington have no access to Internet services on a gallery-wide basis (SPECTRA, Vol. 21, No. 4). This situation is probably true of virtually all of the 15,000 museums, historical societies and archives in the United States as well.

The same deficiencies characterize many local arts and performing arts organizations, relatively few of which are fully computerized, and some of which lack even basic computer equipment. Communication networks in the arts are still uncommon, though participation in services such as Arts Wire have risen dramatically in the past few years. Certainly many artists, particularly those who are not institutionally affiliated, do not own or have access to networked personal computers, and are thus excluded from a medium that they might find has intense creative potential for them

 

 

Information

While electronic networks are certainly communication-rich, at present they are relatively content-poor, especially for researchers in the humanities and arts: an enormous amount of work remains to be done to convert the riches of our arts and cultural heritage information to electronic form. Without a critical mass of information, technological capacity is a hollow structure, like a library without books.

In the sciences, the newest information is the most valuable; historical information plays a distinctly secondary role to current documentation. In the arts and humanities, ancient archival materials are as valuable as modern. Materials accumulated over centuries — manuscripts, texts, plays, maps, dance notation, sound and video recordings, drawings, paintings, sculpture, and artifacts of all kinds, as well as catalogs of all these materials — are awaiting transformation into digital form. Such conversions will be enormously costly, because they must be undertaken at the highest possible quality levels so that the expense of successive re-digitizing can be avoided as technology improves.

The Brittle Books initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities aims to preserve and improve access to 3 million brittle books through a nationwide effort over the next 20 years. The value to scholars and others of such improved access would be even further enhanced were the content of this significant corpus made available across the global Internet. Other projects aiming to increase access to humanities and arts resources include bibliographic, indexing, and object registration databases of long standing, which have been online for several years, such as the MLA Bibliography, the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, and the National Museum of American Art’s Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture. Still others, such as the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and the Library of Congress’ National Coordinated Cataloging Operation (NACO), standardize the vocabulary prevalent in humanities and arts information. If such standards efforts were extended and adequately funded, they could become the building blocks for national cultural heritage databases. They would provide the integrating terminology needed to enable hundreds of individual and institutional projects to combine in a fully accessible digital resource of popular interest and educational value.

While the list of such projects is long and varied — with generous support from NEH and NEA manifest in many cases — it is still a cacophony of individual efforts, unguided by any systematic plan. What is needed are the vision and the funds to convert these separate projects into broadly based national data sets in the humanities and arts. A few model projects that have established a coordinated data collection process include the following:

 

• Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Hosted at the University of Michigan, the ICPSR is supported by funds from the NSF and by over 300 American and Canadian universities as well as national memberships in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere. It maintains an archive of more than 30,000 data sets in the social sciences derived from surveys, censuses and administrative records. Of these, 1,000 are available over the Internet, and others will be added as additional disk space and documentation is prepared.
• American and French Research in the Treasury on the French Language (ARTFL), a database containing the French national literary corpus the Trésor de la Langue Française with works from the 17th to the 20th century.

It is not that the federal government fails to recognize the value of national data collection efforts; substantial support is currently provided for the creation of national data sets in the sciences. In fiscal year 1995, for example, the federal government plans to spend $152 million on the Human Genome Project, the creation of a database of our biological heritage, and (including investment from the private sector) $231 million for the Global Climate Change and Biological Diversity Documentation initiatives. Over the next decade, the federal government will commit many billions of dollars to these and other scientific projects. It is not unreasonable to ask for a similar level of commitment toward building national data sets recording our cultural heritage.

Government support for national data sets in other countries might provide models for similar support in this country. Many cultural databases, such as The Network of European Reference Corpora (NERC); the Oxford Text Archive; EuropArt; and the Network of Art Research Computer Image Systems in Europe (NARCISSE) are being developed in Europe, evidently because Europeans have come to recognize the research value of cultural databases and are discovering that their cultural information can have economic value as well.

 

Software Applications

Digitizing the centuries of existing humanities and arts information will be a long, expensive process that will only be worthwhile if it is built with an eye toward anticipated use and accompanied by software applications and tools that make possible a new dimension of learning and experience.

Burgeoning numbers of users can, for example, already participate in dialogues carried on within listservs; circulate journal articles for peer review with ease; and collaborate on research projects with geographically separated colleagues. Examples of promising tools include the following:

 

• Mosaic, a browsing mechanism containing graphics and hypertext links (developed at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana), which allows a user to navigate the Internet with relative ease.
• Textual Analysis Computing Tools (TACT), a collection of programs for textual analysis which allow scholars to examine their materials in diverse ways.

At the same time, the field is wide open for the development of new tools geared to the needs of network users of cultural heritage information. Some examples of needed new tools include:

 

• Authoring tools suited to the production and exploration of content in the humanities and arts.
• Shareable libraries of software tools.
• More sophisticated navigational tools to replace today’s rudimentary ones.

Needs in this area are detailed further in the document of the Working Group on Technical Requirements, in the second section of this report.

 

Network Standards and Transmission Codes

Standards and transmission codes are the most daunting of all the challenges the developers of global information networks face. The sheer newness and immense size of electronic networks means that standards for many different functions had to be invented nearly overnight, among them encryption for data security; log-on permission; recordkeeping to permit billing for the use of copyrighted material; and network management. This will continue to be true of such standards as data structures, coordinated vocabularies and many more.

Since electronic networks are global communication structures, network standards are by definition problems of the whole. Although different groups of organizations (computer firms, utility companies, federal contractors) assume responsibility for developing discrete parts of the total set of standards/transmission protocols, all work must be informed by a keen awareness of what all other groups are doing if the network is to function at all.

Technical committees of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and, in this country, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) have responsibility for regulating the development of network standards and transmission codes. Because the approval process is cumbersome, companies may publish a new standard and begin using it as they wait for it to make its way through the process. Yet the imperatives of global communication are so great that no proprietary standard could survive if it ignored the interconnectivity requirements of the network as a whole.

Another characteristic of network standards and transmission codes is that standards are in constant evolution as technological advances make new applications possible. Twenty years ago, as the earliest network protocols were being fashioned for use on the ARPANET, it was not envisioned that computer networks would ever be capable of carrying real-time video and that therefore a new protocol (asynchronous transfer mode, or ATM) based on entirely new principles would be required for such transmission to occur satisfactorily.

The network standards discussed above are defined as information interchange standards. Data standards are other criteria which, though not peculiar to the networked environment, protect the long-term value of the data stored in electronic databases, and make the transitions from one form of hardware or software to another easier when technological improvements dictate changes in equipment.

Standards for the content of our cultural heritage must accommodate the special characteristics of humanities and arts information manifested in all media of expression. The global nature of the humanities and arts favors the definition of open standards arrived at by broad consensus of an international community, reflected in ongoing efforts such as:

 

• The Text Encoding Initiative, an international project sponsored by the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing with support from the NEH, the University of Illinois at Chicago and Oxford University, which has created guidelines for Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)-based encoding and interchange of machine-readable texts.
• The Art Information Task Force (AITF), a group representing the concerns of scholars, museum professionals and information specialists that has established a comprehensive set of categories for the description of works of art. Their work has in part been funded by an NEH grant to the College Art Association.
• The Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI), a not-for-profit and for-profit private sector consortium that is working with museums and information networks in the Unites States, Canada and Europe to define application protocols for the interchange of museum data. CIMI grew out of a NEH-funded project to enable museums to exchange data between systems.
• The Image and Information Standards Initiative, sponsored by the Getty Art History Information Program, which is identifying issues in imaging that require collective solutions and standard approaches. Among these issues are the vexing problems of developing guidelines for access to intellectual property and frameworks for project management for the ever-growing universe of digitization projects.

Many similar large-scale standards development efforts, and much education and assistance in the implementation of common methods, will be required before humanities and arts information will be widely available. Nevertheless, it is only through such content and application standards that the information so much desired for cultural enrichment can be made available and usable.

 

People

 

People create information, develop applications and services, train others to navigate available data resources, and are the ultimate contributors to and users of the electronic network. These crucial processes were first begun as individual scholars, librarians and artists became interested in demonstrating the potential of networked information to their communities. Now professional organizations have begun efforts not only to educate their members but also to represent their interests in policy debates. Professional associations in the humanities and the arts have an important role to play, by:

 

 

• Providing forums for discussing standards and priorities, as well as identifying items for policy action.
• Disseminating information (e.g., by producing directories), collecting statistics and evaluating current programs and practices.
• Articulating how improvements in electronic resources would serve the public.
• Sponsoring research into user behavior and the development of educational materials.

Just as professional associations have focused the efforts of individuals wishing to provide leadership in demonstrating the potential of networked information to their audiences, a center created to coordinate the efforts of a large number of professional associations could in turn provide an even greater leveraging effect.

Clearly, training in the use of the information highway will be a persistent concern. Not only will every American soon need basic training in electronic literacy, but specialized training and periodic refreshers will be needed as new resources and technologies appear. One model for such specialized training and software evaluation is currently provided by the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH) based at Rutgers and Princeton Universities. To say that such training will be the joint responsibility of schools and government, parents and teachers, business and the nonprofit sectors means that each segment of the economy will undoubtedly pursue its own agenda: employers will provide training in the hopes of increasing employee productivity; profit-making firms will educate potential users about the benefits of their electronic products. Coordination (or at least acknowledgment) of the aims of the various types of training available will ensure that training in the humanities and the arts is not neglected because these fields offer less obvious or immediate economic benefits.

 Community Response to the Profile Report

 

In order to strengthen its arguments for a voice for humanities and arts in the National Information Infrastructure (NII), sponsors of the National Initiative distributed a draft of this report to strategic organizations and institutions in the cultural heritage community. The primary focus of this feedback was a meeting, on July 14, 1994, at which representatives of more than 40 humanities- and arts-related organizations assembled to consider the Profile report (Appendix E). Appendices C-E reflect the immense institutional and individual expertise brought to bear on these issues by representatives from museums, libraries and archives, colleges and universities, learned societies, foundations and government agencies.

The sponsoring organizations and the Executive Committee of the National Initiative outlined their purposes in convening the National Initiative, and summarized the reports of the two working groups on Technical Requirements and Electronic Resources. David Lytel, Information Infrastructure Specialist from the Executive Office of the President of the United States, was invited to explain the current planning process for the National Information Infrastructure. He described the administration’s model for the NII, whereby users will be both creators as well as recipients of information services, a model conducive to the inclusion of the arts and humanities.

Discussion at the July 14 meeting and subsequent responses from the constituent communities affirmed that the Profile accurately and succinctly portrayed the landscape of technology and electronic resources in which the arts and humanities find themselves today. Important additional observations were made, including the following:

 

 

• The arts and humanities account for a great many jobs; they are important in economic as well as cultural terms.
• Moving cultural materials into the digital environment poses unusual and sophisticated intellectual and technical challenges, the solutions to which will benefit users of the NII in a broad array of other fields and applications, including commercial ones. Giving full attention to the arts and humanities in developing the NII will help ensure U.S. leadership in developing information technology.
• Broad electronic access to the nation’s cultural heritage will be vital for ensuring the accountability of government and the continuing health of democracy in the United States.
• The digital cultural heritage must include materials from the full panoply of this nation’s and the world’s peoples, and include both materials from the past and works and programs currently being produced by artists, musicians, scholars, writers and others.
• Arts and humanities organizations must continue their active involvement in discussions of the public policy issues currently before Congress, including telecommunications reforms, copyright, and federal support for arts and humanities projects and institutions.

 

Publication of the Profile of Humanities and Arts on the Information Highways will both complement and draw further attention to the considerable work being done by the Clinton administration to integrate the humanities and arts into NII planning and development.

 

Next Steps

The three initial sponsors — the Getty Art History Information Program, the Coalition for Networked Information, and the American Council of Learned Societies — are committed to continuing the National Initiative. Preparation of this report is the first key step in an agenda for action; subsequent key steps include the following:

 

• Articulating the public benefits of making the humanities and the arts full contributors to the NII in order to educate policymakers, decision-makers at standards-setting bodies and funding agencies, private-sector developers and potential users.
• Advocating the creation of a critical mass of cultural heritage information in digital form — the content of the arts and humanities on the information highways.
• Guiding the development of the required standards, tools and services necessary for humanities and arts access.
• Making sure that the humanities and the arts are represented in the policy discussions pertaining to the further evolution of the national and global information infrastructure by building coalitions with organizations in other fields or sectors and by identifying policy issues.

To pursue these, the National Initiative expects to open a Washington office to coordinate the involvement of humanities and arts organizations in discussions, policy-making and demonstration projects bearing on the development of the National Information Infrastructure.

Like the Internet, the humanities and the arts have as a primary purpose making connections: between events, concepts, disciplines, institutions, and individuals. As a conceptual network, the humanities and the arts encompass multiple styles and perspectives; they interconnect memory and innovation, imagination and interpretation, knowledge and inspiration. The nation can justifiably celebrate the enrichment that the humanities and arts bring to the quality of its individual and community lives, and work with equal enthusiasm to adopt the National Information Infrastructure as an extraordinary opportunity for the sharing, preservation, and enrichment of our cultural heritage.