Co-Chairs:
Raj Reddy
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
Members:
Eric A. Benhamou
Vinton Cerf
Ching-chih Chen
David Cooper
Steven D. Dorfman
David Dorman
Robert Ewald
Sherrilynne S. Fuller
Hector Garcia-Molina
Susan L. Graham
James N. Gray
W. Daniel Hillis
Robert E. Kahn
Ken Kennedy
John P. Miller
David C. Nagel
Edward H. Shortliffe
Larry Smarr
Joe F. Thompson
Leslie Vadasz
Steven J. Wallach |
The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
The White House
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President:
Given the high priority focus of your new Administration on the
importance of education and educational technology funding to strengthen
us as a Nation, we believe that you will find the enclosed report
on digital libraries of special interest.
Over the past year, the President's Information Technology Advisory
Committee (PITAC) has focused much of its attention on providing
a vision for information technology's role in driving progress in
the 21st century, particularly progress in education and human development
for all citizens. One of two PITAC panels focusing on educational
issues examined the status of digital libraries -- the networked
collections of digital text, documents, images, sounds, scientific
data, and software that are the core of today's Internet and tomorrow's
universally accessible digital repositories of all human knowledge.
We are especially pleased to forward to you this report, Digital
Libraries: Universal Access to Human Knowledge, because
of the profound relevance of this technology to advancing quality
education in every school, learning center, and home in the country.
Realizing the full potential of digital libraries will take strong
leadership and a steady commitment of resources to tackle the substantial
technical and policy barriers that inhibit our rapid progress toward
universally accessible knowledge libraries. The PITAC offers four
key recommendations that will make digital libraries more pervasive
and usable by all citizens:
- Expand research in new systems for organizing online content,
and address issues related to system scalability, interoperability,
archival storage and preservation, intellectual property
rights, privacy and security, and human use;
- Create several Federally funded large-scale digital library
testbeds;
- Provide Federal funding to make all public Federal content
persistently available in digital form on the Internet;
and
- Have the Federal government play a leadership role in
evolving policy to fairly address intellectual property
rights in the digital age.
|
The PITAC strongly urges the Federal government to continue its
leadership role in the research and development efforts needed to
extend the capabilities of digital libraries. We believe that the
recommendations in our report can help move the Nation toward realizing
the enormously powerful vision of anytime, anywhere access to the
best of human thought and culture, so that no classroom or individual
is isolated from knowledge resources. Digital libraries can and
should be an essential resource for human learning and development
in the new century.
We look forward to working with you, your Administration, and members
of Congress to dramatically improve our education system through
the use of information technology. As PITAC strives to provide sound,
well-researched advice, we hope that you and members of your Administration
will feel free at any time to discuss these and other important
issues with the Committee.
|
