"Between 1966 and 1993, humanities degrees awarded at first tier (Carnegie Foundation Classification--Research I) research universities fell by 25 per cent. Whereas in 1966 20.7 per cent of bachelor's degrees awarded were in the humanities, by 1993 they made up only 12.7 per cent of degrees awarded." [Report of the AAU Task Force on the Role and Status of the Humanities Survey #2 - Report Draft #2, September 10, 2002, p.1; statistics qtd. from Kernan, Alvin, ed. Appendix, p.247; "Change in the Humanities," pp. 5-6. What's Happened to the Humanities. Princeton University Press. 1997.]

"Digital libraries can support unprecedented new tools for visualizing and linking diverse documents, but none of us in the humanities or any area should expect that our traditional publications will, if simply translated into electronic form, be able to take full advantage of a mature digital library system. We need to develop wholly new forms of publication (e.g., walk-throughs of reconstructed space), and to reinvent traditional document types (e.g., dictionaries, museum catalogs, essays). Humanists cannot expect others to do this work for them: rather, they must work in collaboration with each other and with their colleagues conducting research relevant to digital libraries. Furthermore, the humanities constitute a heterogeneous, largely decentralized group of disciplines, each with its own problems and academic cultures. To develop methods of sufficient generality and to produce examples that will be compelling to a wide audience, we need research that not only has a deep grounding in one particular field but that crosses many areas." [from A Digital Library for the Humanities, a 1998 DLI II proposal by Greg Crane et al.]

"As we move into the electronic era of digital objects it is important to know that there are new barbarians at the gate and that we are moving into an era where much of what we know today, much of what is coded and written electronically, will be lost forever. We are, to my mind, living in the midst of digital Dark Ages; consequently, much as monks of times past, it falls to librarians and archivists to hold to the tradition which reveres history and the published heritage of our times." [Terry Kuny, XIST/Consultant, National Library of Canada, "The Digital Dark Ages? Challenges in the Preservation of Electronic Information." International Preservation News, No. 17, May 1998.]

"Faculty time, both as teachers and researchers, is the most valuable resource in the university. Effective use of that time is crucial to the success of the university in fulfilling both its teaching and research missions. Thus time diverted from those activities to prepare and publish their own manuscripts, time spent to search for materials that are no longer available through well-established channels, time spent reading things that prove after an hour or two to be valueless, increased time spent evaluating their colleagues for tenure -- these are all costs, true costs, using the scarcest resources of the academy. Another example of failing to consider systemwide costs is the common practice of university presses to request that the author provide camera-ready copy. That eliminates our substantial typesetting costs, but it takes a large amount of the scholar's time. The costs have not been reduced, they have been shifted. Indeed, as the work is now done not by a medium-skilled typesetter but by a highly-trained, highly-paid academic, the system-wide costs have undoubtedly been increased. However we will continue to make that request because the university presses, to meet stringent financial criteria, are forced to make narrow, not systemwide, decisions to save costs." [Colin Day, "Digital Alternatives: Solving the Problem or Shifting the Cost?", Journal of Electronic Publishing (Vol. 4 No. 1, Sep, 1998)]

"The core functions of publishing, from content filtering to audience aggregation, can be performed by a group of interested users. This is particularly true when there is already a well-defined target community. This can be a disruptive force in the publishing marketplace. So, for example, sites such as Cnet and ZDnet spent tens of millions of dollars building and promoting portals for technical information on the web, while two college students built a site called Slashdot ("News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.") into a similarly powerful market presence simply by inviting their readers to submit, organize and comment on their own content. Interestingly enough, though, as Slashdot has grown in popularity and evolved into a real business, it has needed to add more editorial staff to filter the submissions of a growing marketplace of readers who now recognize that exposure via Slashdot is a powerful marketing tool. In short, even a community-centric effort ends up recreating some of the fundamental dynamics of publisher as middleman and aggregator. What this evolution illustrates is that publishers will not go away, but that they cannot be complacent. Publishers must serve the values of both authors and readers. If they try to enforce an artificial scarcity, charge prices that are too high or otherwise violate the norms of their target community, they will encourage that community to self-organize, or new competitors will emerge who are better attuned to the values of the community." [Tim O'Reilly, "Information Wants to Be Valuable", Nature]

The Library (raw materials) [selection, aggregation, arrangement, access, preservation]
The Study (analysis, creation) [selection, arrangement, argument, innovation]
The Jury (peer review) [evaluation, feedback]
The Press (reproduction, distribution) [design, standardization, editing, aggregation]
The Marketplace (marketing, adoption, use, response) [valuation]
The Library (selection, aggregation, etc.)