Editor's Interview

The Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO IT)

Anne G. Murphy
Digital Promise Project

Your Web site includes references to several project names: the Digital Promise, the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO IT), and the Digital Gift to the Nation. The historical precedents cited for the proposed funding are interesting. Would you provide a brief summary of the project and the ways in which it has evolved since its inception in 2001?

The names reflect the evolution of the project. In 2001, the Century Fund and the Carnegie Endowment asked Mr. Minow, former Chair of the FCC and Mr. Grossman, former President of NBC News and PBS to look at questions concerning telecommunications and the not-for-profit sector. This project was dubbed the Digital Promise Project.

In 2002, the project published its findings and recommendations in a book called The Digital Gift to the Nation, which proposed the creation of the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust. The recommendation was built on historical precedence. In each of the past three centuries, Congress made a bold, farsighted investment in educating all our citizens. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set aside public land to support public schools in every state. The Land-Grant Colleges Act of 1862 established 105 land-grant colleges that made America’s agriculture and industry the most advanced in the world. The GI Bill of 1944 profoundly expanded educational opportunities for veterans of World War II.

Now, we propose, it is time for the fourth major educational initiative to advance those great legacies into the 21st century. Congress should create the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO IT) to open the door to a knowledge-based future for Americans of all ages. The Trust would be funded by revenues from a publicly owned asset, the electromagnetic spectrum, the 21st century equivalent of the publicly owned land that earlier financed America’s public schools and public higher education. Within the next decade, congressionally mandated federal auctions and fees for the commercial exploitation of these spectrum frequencies are expected to produce tens of billions of dollars. Over the years, DO IT will accumulate approximately $20 billion of this revenue. Conservatively invested, this would back the Trust with an annual budget of approximately $1 billion.

The focus is on education, but digitizing materials has a prominent place in the project. What is the scope of the digitization portion of the Digital Promise and have you set guidelines for conversion and types of content to be included? Will born-digital materials be included as well?

We need to keep in mind that, at this stage, the Digital Opportunity Trust is a proposal. No activity has taken place, and certainly no definitive allocations have been made. As a result of our studies, we propose that one of the main objectives of the Digital Opportunity Trust be to assist in the digitization of the collections of universities, museums, libraries, and cultural institutions—America’s heritage is stored there. DO IT will help to digitize these collections and to set standards to conserve born-digital materials, ensuring their accessibility to all. It will assist in the development of content and software to integrate the riches of our cultural institutions into classroom curricula and stimulate research in the humanities.

The art of digital capture is in a state of flux, which may be unavoidable at this point in order to ensure that progress in the technology continues. But the dizzying array of individual projects being undertaken makes it difficult to develop consistent, reliable management of the growing digital collections. It’s not enough to rely entirely on powerful search engines that struggle to make sense of countless formats and products of highly varying quality. Compatibility must be assured and standards must be set by an impartial public body such as DO IT. One major issue is the core set of information that should be attached to digital information—whether it’s a text, a recording, an image, or some other form. Standard methods have been developed for book and article citations (the ISBN provides a unique identifier for books), and the music industry has a variety of standards. The problem becomes increasingly challenging when the original material is an artifact, an excerpt from an animation, or another format.

There is disagreement today about the minimum set of information that should be provided (author, location, etc.) and how it should be recorded. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has received approval as an international “resource discovery metadata standard on the Internet” (ISO 15836). It provides “a foundation block of modular, interoperable metadata for distributed resources.” But much work remains before the standard is universally accepted and ambiguities about interpreting the standard are resolved.

How will this initiative complement recent and current digitization projects by libraries, archives, and museums? Does this initiative relate to the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) under way by the Library of Congress?

Our work has been deeply informed by the work of Laura Campbell and her staff at the Library of Congress. We see the work of DO IT as a complement to the fine work being done by the Library, the NEH, and IMLS.

The digital content created for the project will exist within a distributed network of education providers. How will the content be managed over time?

As proposed, DO IT would provide funding to advisory groups to develop criteria and help to establish urgently needed guidelines and interoperable standards. The Trust will encourage their widespread adoption by acting as an important funding source for digitization projects. It would establish task forces to tackle the issues of intellectual property, metadata, and the variety of problems encountered in ensuring continuous migration of archival collections to ensure compatibility and the longevity of these resources.

Your project has been compared to work by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). All of these groups, but NSF in particular, have included support for long-term access to content created by their projects. What priority will preserving the digital content created by your project have? Will the resources for the project include sustainable funding for preserving your digital content?

We need to build trusted digital repositories where these sources will persist, where they will be unaltered in form or content by hackers and others, where their provenance is known, and where they can be easily located using sophisticated user interfaces.

What is the current status of Congressional support for the Digital Promise, and what are your plans for promoting the initiative this year?

In 2003, Congress allocated funds for an in-depth study of the rationale for the creation of DO IT, the development of a Research and Development Roadmap, and a proposal for the structure and governance of the new entity. This report will be delivered to Congress in October 2003. Shortly thereafter, Senator Dodd and others will introduce legislation to implement the report.

We invite your readers to read the report on our Web site (available October 24, 2003). If they agree with our recommendations, we request that they ask their senators to support the Dodd legislative initiative.

What do you see as the greatest enablers for the project? … the greatest barriers?

In the course of the project, we have developed an outstanding Leadership Circle and Coalition of Organizations that support this initiative. In the coming months we will be working with members of both groups and their constituencies to raise awareness of the proposal and to develop widespread expressions of support.

The greatest barrier is the burden on the federal budget. We are reminded, however, that each of the other major transformations in learning was enacted during a period of war. The Land-Grant Colleges Act, perhaps the greatest piece of education legislation ever enacted, was signed by Abraham Lincoln at the height of the Civil War.

Publishing Information

RLG DigiNews (ISSN 1093-5371) is a Web-based newsletter conceived by the RLG preservation community and developed to serve a broad readership around the world. It is produced by staff in the Department of Research, Cornell University Library, in consultation with RLG and is published six times a year at www.rlg.org.

Materials in RLG DigiNews are subject to copyright and other proprietary rights. Permission is hereby given to use material found here for research purposes or private study. When citing RLG DigiNews, include the article title and author referenced plus "RLG DigiNews." Any uses other than for research or private study require written permission from RLG and/or the author of the article. To receive this, and prior to using RLG DigiNews contents in any presentations or materials you share with others, please contact Jennifer Hartzell , RLG Corporate Communications.

Please send comments and questions about this or other issues to the RLG DigiNews editors.

Co-Editors: Anne R. Kenney and Nancy Y. McGovern; Associate Editor: Robin Dale (RLG); Technical Researcher: Richard Entlich; Contributor: Erica Olsen; Copy Editor: Martha Crowe; Production Coordinator: Carla DeMello; Assistant: Valerie Jacoski.

All links in this issue were confirmed accurate as of October 15, 2003.