Message from the President
With each annual report, CLIR presents current programs and projects that exemplify our mission and reflect our vision in service to a durable and accessible cultural heritage. During the last few decades we have worked with colleagues focused on varieties of cultural expression that are hidden from public view or threatened by the exigencies of climate change. In these instances CLIR provides the services and expertise to make visible and secure what otherwise would be lost. Accordingly, this year we highlight ongoing work on behalf of Hidden Collections Africa, emerging projects such as our formal partnership with the Integral Ecology Research Network at the University of Oxford, and ongoing programs such as Recordings at Risk and Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices.
This year we also approach a milestone: CLIR’s 70th anniversary spans the years 2026 and 2027. To flourish for seven decades is itself an accomplishment worth noting. In the coming months, we will comb our archives for notable contributions, insights, and projects that show the evolution–and continuity–of CLIR’s original mandate to preserve and make accessible knowledge integral to the public good.
CLIR’s origin story is instructive. The Council was inaugurated to cooperatively effect a better professional response to a poorly managed, redundant, and expensive explosion of information—the 1950s brought microfilm and microfiche, exponential growth in academic book publishing and a surge of new journals, and the rise of television as a chief source of narrating world events and our place in it. Against this backdrop, the potential loss of information due to outdated methods of curation and preservation presented real threats to the futures of research and learning.
Those distant concerns parallel our contemporary focus on better managing the wild proliferation of digital information and data, a nearly ubiquitous but poorly understood adoption of artificial intelligence as, in many instances, a tool we substitute for our acumen and allow to “speak” for us, and the still pervasive threat of at-risk culture in a Pandora’s media.
We will also attempt to place CLIR in the current zeitgeist—a roiled and unpredictable space and time as of this writing—and postulate, however misty our lens, what may lie ahead.
Contemplating our relative longevity, certain perspectives come to mind that have guided us through the latter half of the 20th century and well into the 21st: “perspectives” in the sense of ways of seeing, frameworks of reference that provide for a broader understanding of the world, translating across generations and historical periods punctuated by shifting norms and often jarring disruptions. These are vital conceptual guides for interpreting and structuring our response to present “wicked” challenges:
Human rights. CLIR’s programs and projects assume that all people have a protected right to knowledge, a right to participate in one’s culture of choice, and a right to education. In the last several years we have cited specifically the Universal Declaration of Human Rights published in 1948 in the aftermath of World War II as the framework for much of our work in the memory and cultural heritage sectors. The Declaration is as urgent now as it was when adopted.
Complexity. The founders of the Council understood the tsunami of new information in 1957 as one aspect of a very expensive crisis. A second element contributing to the crisis was a mindset within higher education that prized strongly independent institutions that act competitively and uncooperatively, prompted by incentives for institutional growth and status rivalry (rankings, prestige). There was nothing that the Council could do to staunch the information explosion. The real challenge was instilling a new frame of reference whereby the academic institutions would understand the crisis as systemic and warranting a collaborative, interdependent resolution. Seeing our workplace through the lens of a complex system has proven core to CLIR’s mission ever since.
Community. To adequately address complex challenges, we have since inception believed that remedial action is best realized through collaborative relationships. Communities of purpose and practice are essential to a sustainable cultural heritage. CLIR facilitates these functioning networks through shared research publications, regranting programs, digital libraries, memoranda of understanding, affiliations, professional development and leadership programs, and fellowships. When successful, these efforts help shape a social unit defined by cohesiveness and mutual interest and–at best–a publicly minded spirit.
Hope. CLIR accepts hope as a sophisticated cognitive strategy, a state of mind based on expectations of positive changes in events or circumstances in life and the world at large. Hope inspires us to adjust the focus of our human agency and our place in the world in order to effect different, more salutary outcomes in the face of prevailing detrimental forces. Transformative hope requires the perception of a temporal continuity: drawing upon experience and knowledgeable insight (that occurred in the past) selectively reconstituted as a series of steps and purposeful iterations (performed in a progressive present) that can then be imaginatively applied to a subsequent reality (future) and, if successful, instantiate that future. We try to develop working environments that allow for hope to flourish.
These perspectives are intertwined. They require long term dedication, and they require an optimism that human agency that embraces diversity of thought and equitable ends is within our collective reach. Going on 70 years, for educational, cultural and memory institutions and professions in service to the common good, CLIR has and will continue to advance adaptive, consilient praxis; to ameliorate the fractures of our unsettled times, we work together: an applied harmony.
Charles Henry
President