Volume III
Issue 17
Summer 2001

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Chiefs of Four Cultural Behemoths Ponder Digital Acquisitions, Intellectual Property and Air Conditioning

by Rennie Terhune

Roundtable: "Culture and Technology: Present and Future"
Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York City
30 April 2001, 5:00pm

Panel: Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Paul LeClerc, President and CEO of the New York Public Library; George Rupp, President of Columbia University and Lawrence M. Small, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

[This was the third in a series of roundtable discussions to explore the integration and use of new technologies in cultural institutions. The series began in April 1998 and is a program of the Lita Annenberg Hazen and Joseph H. Hazen Center for Electronic Information Resources in the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Met.]

At a panel discussion one spring evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, four middle-aged white men sat in sage-green upholstered armchairs, on a sparsely furnished stage, sipping from goblets of water and talking about new technology and its impact on cultural institutions.

Introductions by Philippe de Montebello, the host, were brief, prefaced by his remarks on the usefulness of digital technology as "information and enticement" helpful to the Metropolitan Museum's efforts to "seduce" its audience. The Met's Director left no doubt that his priority is the actual collection of objects in the Museum's stores, and that new-fangled technology is interesting to him mainly as a means to bringing more visitors to experience the Museum's collections firsthand. To his left sat Dr. Paul LeClerc, CEO of the New York Public Library since 1993; George Rupp, since 1993 the 18th president of Columbia University and Lawrence Small, since January 2000 the 11th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, based in Washington, DC.

LeClerc told the audience the New York Public Library (NYPL) will continue for the foreseeable future to acquire tangible materials - books, periodicals, recordings, films, etc. - while also increasing its digitized and digital holdings. The Library is still learning how to shape its three primary functions - possessing, preserving and providing access - to accommodate digital information.

All three functions take on new meaning, LeClerc said. The nature of possession of digital information is quite different from books and other tangible holdings, complicated by the ongoing transformations of information technology. Similarly, the Library knows a lot about paper preservation, but not much yet about how to preserve electronic information. And access can be hugely expanded, as compared to access to tangible materials: the NYPL website received 300 million hits in a year, from at least 179 countries - 25 million hits in April alone. More digitization is planned to add 500,000 images from rare books, photographs and fine art prints to the Library's online web resources. De Montebello said the Met also plans to continue digitizing photos of art, however given the huge volume of the museum's holdings, "triage will be necessary" - not all pictures will be digitized. He also mentioned the ongoing image-bank initiatives J-Stor and Art-Stor.

Dr. Rupp traced Columbia University's interest in intellectual property assets to the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1982. Since then, universities have been permitted to own intellectual property generated on their campuses, even if the government funded some of the work. This means that many patents on inventions are now held by universities. In the year 2000, Columbia University received $144 million in patent license fees - mostly for biomedical research. Rupp was careful to point out that the patents held by Columbia are licensed on a de minimis basis - the fees the University received were paid from $30 billion in sales of pharmaceutical products using the licensed patents. Illustrating the other side of the licensing equation, LeClerc said the NYPL spends about 10% of its research library budget on electronic information - most of that in license fees for the use of someone else's information "living in servers somewhere."

Other uses of digital information by Columbia include providing in-house resources for teachers, brokering university-generated digital content to other educational uses, and Fathom, the online research resource supported by a thirteen-member consortium. George Rupp cited a study by Columbia political scientist Ira Katznelson and law professor Jane Ginsburg that determined digital intellectual property was more like patents than like copyright and trademark. This committee's findings led the university to create policy incentives for universities and inventors alike.

Before coming to the Smithsonian, Larry Small worked in the for-profit world at Citicorp and in the government as head of Fannie Mae (the federal mortgage-lending institution). He began his remarks pointing out other important technological advances besides digital ones. Around 1975, he said, he asked an official at a small-town bank to name the greatest invention in the past fifty years. The answer came back at once - air conditioning.

As to digital technologies, he advised not trying to compete with Disney by becoming a theme park. Rather, he stressed the importance of applying technology where it is useful - as electronic information and also for climate control, new object-conservation techniques, lightweight and safe armatures for exhibiting artifacts, etc. The Smithsonian is 155 years old and receives 40 million physical visitors to its nine sites (including one in Panama) and 30 million web visitors in one year. Small reported that seven million visitors in search of "the real thing" each year visit the glass case containing the hat Abe Lincoln wore when he was assassinated. The security guards are continually wiping fingerprints off the vitrine, because so many people touch the glass to get as close as possible to the hat. In contrast, Small said, "I don't touch my screen when I go on the web."

The importance of access to authentic resources was a point on which all four seemed to agree. LeClerc told of the struggles he once had in Paris getting into a research library - after ascertaining the hours the library would be open to visitors and bringing a letter of recommendation, he was turned away for improper attire. He compared that research fiasco with today's reality where you can go online "from Shanghai at midnight" and email an entire bibliography to yourself in one sitting.

Asked how the University uses new technology for its primary activity - education - Rupp cited the Center for New Media Technology and Learning and its innovative music education initiatives using electronic information technology. As another example, Rupp mentioned the ability to hear online scenes from Shakespeare's King Lear performed eight ways by eight actors.

In response to a question about e-books, LeClerc said the NYPL has been introducing e-books at branch libraries in a test program.

Small has observed generational differences in museum visitors - he told of children's attraction to computer screens, for example, when they appear as part of a larger exhibition. Whereas older visitors might progress gradually past a timeline, laid out visually in space, kids will "aim directly for the screens."

One audience member suggested cultural institutions agree to a moratorium on acquiring new things, because so little of what they already own is shown to the public. Proud to be elitist, de Montebello uttered a short defense of study collections. Then Small explained that life does not stand still: a new beetle had just been discovered and added to the Smithsonian's insect collection, and different kinds of chad were also being accessioned, in response to the recent US election-fraud investigations in Florida.

About the Author:

Rennie Terhune is a freelance journalist. This is her first article for the Newsletter. Email sent to her in care of the editor at editor@arts4all.com will be forwarded.

Resources:

The panel discussion, "Culture and Technology: Present and Future" took place on 30 April 2001 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The Met website is at http://www.metmuseum.org.

More information on J-Stor and Art-Stor is available at http://www.jstor.org and http://www.mellon.org/awmf.html.

The New York Public Library's website is at http://www.nypl.org.

Columbia University's website can be found at http://www.columbia.edu. Dr. Rupp has resigned his post, effective Summer 2002. A search is underway for his successor.

Fathom provides online courses and extensive, authenticated, searchable library resources on many topics. Its homepage is http://www.fathom.com. Member institutions, from the United States and the UK, include the New York Public Library, the Victoria and Albert, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, London School of Economics, American Film Institute and the RAND Corporation.

The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning has a website at http://www.ccnmtl.columbia.edu. Access to Dr. Rupp's King Lear-eight-ways example is limited to those with Columbia ID's.

The Smithsonian's main website appears at http://www.si.edu. According to The New York Times, Larry Small has been criticized by some staff for treating the Smithsonian too much like a business, not understanding the nonprofit ethos, and courting impropriety by giving funding sources unseemly control over museum matters. (Source: Elaine Sciolino, "Smithsonian Group Criticizes Official on Donor Contract," The New York Times, 26 May 2001, National Report, page A8.)

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