Please give. We are continually asked to donate to various causes, projects, and contemporary challenges. Philanthropy is deeply embedded into American culture, a feature of ‘the life well lived’ since our colonial founding. Greatly augmented and formalized over the following centuries, a vibrant industry of giving pervades our contemporary society. Foundations, individuals, and corporations generously bestow financial support for tens of thousands of institutions and organizations.
As institutions designed to share, interpret, and discover knowledge, external funding is essential to our success. The last 80 years have been especially tumultuous. Most of us have had to address the proliferation, redundancies, high costs, and idiosyncratic management of a wealth of information and formats: books, journals, microforms, microfilm, television, radio, audio tapes, film. This riot of knowledge was further complicated by the rise of computers, personal devices, and an explosion of born digital information that, when first measured in the 1990s, appeared to surpass annually the volume of the entire human record of our first six thousand years of written expression. Since then, growth has been exponential.
As a not for profit, CLIR has evolved over sixty years in a philanthropic environment that has been more strictly limited to grants from foundations. The Council on Library Resources (CLR), predecessor to CLIR, was founded in 1957 to address the proliferation, redundancies, high costs, and idiosyncratic management of a wealth of information and formats: books, journals, microforms, microfilm, television, radio, audio tapes, film. This riot of knowledge was further complicated by the rise of computers, personal devices, and an explosion of born digital information that, when measured, appeared to surpass annually the volume of the entire human record of our first six thousand years of written expression.
We have been fortunate to work with leaders and visionaries who have consistently underwritten our pursuit of mission and values on behalf of our constituencies: building communities of practice, encouraging formative collaborations among us through sharing of talent, resources, and ideas. Organizing knowledge for greater access and sustainability, and facilitating the participation in our cultural commonwealth have been major themes of conduct for decades.
Today, while carrying forward many of the themes of years past, our challenges are of a different nature than our historical focus. This is to be expected. An ongoing pandemic, with its disruption of budgets, enrollment, planning, and longer term consistency within higher education and cultural institutions, and the increasingly evident corrosive effects of climate change on practically all enterprise devoted to knowledge and culture create a working environment that is fraught, unpredictable, and replete with challenges that are large scale, multidisciplinary, cross institutional, and often international in scope.
In this fitful contemporary light, our past is insufficient prologue. The traditional timeline of grant allocation comprised two or three year investments, with some extensions. Five years was often considered a long commitment. Annual reports, and the relevant annual re-allocation of proportionate funds, have also been typical. Recent projects our sponsors and colleagues have asked us to undertake, such as the Digital Library of the Middle East, Pangia, and Hidden Collections Africa, as well as international expansions of our leadership programs, reflect and exacerbate the challenges of legacy efforts, and require a more organic approach than those of our traditional methodologies. They are less bounded, evolve in less linear fashion, attract unexpected sponsors and collaborators. The beginning, middle, and end points so common to funding models seem less applicable, even counterproductive, in today’s complex churn. We are adapting to more unsettled working conditions and turbid circumstance.
A pervasive inequality across institutions and ethnic communities also calls into question the traditional funding models. Two benchmarks are especially useful indications of this disparity: infrastructure and sustainability. Infrastructure typically refers to built, physical components of systems that permit the operation of our society, and can include services, practices, tools, and procedures necessary for the ongoing maintenance of these systems. In a digital knowledge ecology, wires, cables, software, algorithms, and servers are fundamental infrastructure, along with rules of organization, professional support skills, standardized tools, and applications of inquiry and analysis.
Sustainability generally is measured by the supply of funding available post-grant that prolongs the project without relying on continual investment by the original funding source. This emphasis is understandable, as it signals ongoing institutional commitment with the possibility of augmenting the project. It is, like infrastructure, reductive and formulaic. Without question, grant funding that insists on adequate infrastructure and ongoing financial outlays privileges those institutions and organizations that already enjoy a more robust network of physical systems and professional expertise, along with money to extend the project.
In our contemporary environment, we need to explore a differently informed system of philanthropy, one that is measured in ten year, even twenty year, increments. The extended timeline has several advantages. Time is needed to construct the infrastructure and cultivate the finances that less enabled institutions lack. It allows for better managing the evolution of the project that less predictable working conditions impede. A longer grant period would also meaningfully advance social justice. In our working environment, chiefly focused on knowledge, achieving social justice requires the equitable distribution of knowledge and related resources, ongoing access to this knowledge, fostering participation in the cultural commonwealth represented by the accumulation and preservation of knowledge, and the promotion of diversity of ideas and perspectives essential for a just society.
As importantly, a longer timeframe of funding fluoresces a redefinition of key terms and conceptual framing of a project’s goals. An expanded concept of infrastructure would comprise an applied interdependence of suppoort across institutions, cultures, and generations, gaining an organic complexity and motion to infrastructure that is often missing. A less bounded, more thoughtful approach would attract new collaborators and contributors who know the project is not short lived. The technological platform could similarly evolve; a longer time frame also can attract more of a community of technologists who can work together to mutual benefit that would be more difficult in a shorter build out: team sourcing and alliance maturation. Other benefits of achieving interdependence include integrating the knowledge and resources developed by longer term projects into teaching and research; curricular development and innovative practices of reuse and repurposing of this knowledge would be encouraged. Architecting platforms that welcome new practitioners, new resources, and fresh perspectives would be integral to the design.
By interweaving sustainability and infrastructure as symbiotic and undetachable functions, longer term and more qualitatively benchmarked funding cycles would provide opportunity for larger scale community building, infrastructure development, and diverse revenue streams. The time and investment for greater systemic social and intellectual engagement repurposes these efforts to become less of a project in the traditional sense, more of a catalyst for progressive entanglement. The more aligned the functions of sustainability with infrastructure, the more enduring the enterprise.
Two initial practical changes in funding strategy emerge from these considerations. One is to promote support by consortium for complex digital projects. It is not reasonable that a single foundation or agency could or should bear the burden of these necessarily large financial allocations. Bringing together several funders to share the costs and leverage their outlay over time would compel strong communication among investors, foster an alignment of interests that promotes continuity and community building, and enable a fiduciary balancing of resources. Second, funders should consider adopting a much greater impersonal approach. The traditional model of funding has been tied to individuals to a great extent; the principal investigator is a functional key to this arrangement, but also among the most salient weaknesses athwart project durability. So often projects, reliant on an individual for success, degrade or wallow too easily if the principal becomes disengaged, transfers, or retires. Receiving attribution for funding is an aspect of the arithmetic of prestige and difficult to counter, but given the fragility of this model and the underappreciated costs of stasis or irrelevance, an alternative for ascribing credit and by extension calibrating benchmarks of project execution is encouraged.
These investments, thus structured and defined, may transcend traditional temporal and financial demarcations, and better reflect more sophisticated cognitive strategies, enlarging our capacity of seeing and knowing, whereby discourse and discovery are equitably shared regardless of place or position, are durable across generations, susceptible to the stir of future composition and projective turns.
