In 2022 I circulated an essay entitled “Philanthropy in a New Key.” It argued for a more expansive, complex understanding of “sustainability” and “infrastructure,” two key concepts relating to maintaining projects and organizations. Usually distilled to money and technical networks as essential to a project’s durability, the essay countered with the prospect of rethinking these terms to include a socially constructed support system, wherein sustainability and infrastructure would combine and be embodied by intergenerational engagement, a passing along of skills, expertise, intellectual contribution, and societal adoption that would greatly enhance the prospects of a project’s longevity and evolution. The impetus to rethink these concepts arose in part because CLIR’ projects have become more complex, longer term, less bounded, multifaceted, and international.
Extending our reconceptualizing, this year has been focused on new cooperative working relationships: “Partnership in a New Key,” which can be defined as shared work structured by a functional reciprocity conducive to interdependence. A basic assumption is that broad transformative advancement cannot be achieved by CLIR as a single organization, or by our partners alone, but we can combine mutual interests and purpose with unique professional skills, constituent engagement, and organizational acumen to make progress together.
The diversity of the partners speaks to our complex aspirations: a corporation; an international magazine; a distinguished university that includes several departments, faculty, students, and a celebrated research library; a laboratory focused on advanced foreign language text analysis; and a new climate related research institute at the University of Oxford. Some practical outcomes of these cooperative ventures? New digital resources, robust search and discovery methodologies, and globally applicable training schemas, in addition to transnational curricular development, reorganizations of open and transferable knowledge, and inventive forms of narrative expression and storytelling.
The partnership between CLIR and Howard University, an historically Black university, fosters an exchange of knowledge, methodologies, and best practices augmenting and anchoring the Hidden Collections Africa project. The partnership facilitates a bidirectional participation of a plethora of African universities with Howard University’s departments of History, Journalism, and Art History, as well as the Moorland-Spingarn Research Library, which houses one of the world’s finest collections relating to the African diaspora. Existing student and faculty exchange programs will be utilized. The partnership cultivates a new generation of scholars and professionals to preserve and disseminate cultural heritage on an international level. CLIR provides program management expertise, honed through the Digitizing Hidden Collections program.
In an effort to expand and enhance the utility and reach of CLIR’s Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) project, we have begun a new collaboration with KITAB, a research laboratory based at the Aga Khan University in London as well as the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI). Our new partnerships provide DLME users a unique, state-of-the-art digital toolbox and a forum for discussions about Arabic texts in completely new ways and to expand the frontiers of knowledge about one of the world’s largest and most complex textual traditions. OpenITI’s technical advances include sophisticated Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) models that allow KITAB to more easily apply their widely recognized text reuse algorithm to create engaging visualizations of text reuse over time. The DLME provides an enlarged corpus of texts, our network of library contributors, and expertise in pipeline development to allow more institutions to participate in this growing corpus of full-text resources. The community of scholars associated with KITAB will significantly enrich the utility of an increasingly expansive array of digital datasets.
This partnership has been created to advance new forms of creative expression in service to the environment, culture heritage, and social justice in the era of climate change. Some of our goals include: developing new methods of storytelling that encourage human responsibility for, and to, our home world, with an emphasis on digital technology and the expressive models it can facilitate; exploring the efficacy of a variety of multimedia techniques in relation to different narrative forms; and designing, implementing, and maintaining new analytical and visualization tools for large scale datasets interpretation. Our objectives also include incorporating often marginalized voices from across the planet, generally with the theme of culture under threat and loss from climate change, and to work concertedly to interrelate the ideas and perspectives of the reading audiences, cultural constituencies, and professional networks of Orion Magazine and CLIR.
Employing advanced yet intuitive technologies, Coherent Digital, a corporation founded by a CLIR Board member and based in part on ideas generated by the Coherence at Scale project, provides access to “grey literature” content that is often impermanent. This includes millions of high-quality, statistically rich reports published every year by governments, IGOs, NGOs, and think tanks. Alongside the millions of historical items libraries digitize and upload each year—books, documents, maps, recordings, photos, letters, diaries, and ephemera— this literature provides essential context for historical data with the potential to inform new research. The basic premise of Coherent Digital—making accessible and reusable erstwhile siloed collections essential for scholarship and teaching—is laudable. CLIR is working with the company to identify means of support for the Hidden Collections Africa and Pangia projects through Policy Commons and Africa Commons.
CLIR’s most recent partnership, by invitation, is Laudato Si’ Research Institute (LSRI), in the Jesuit-run Campion Hall, Oxford University, a global project that identifies ways academic researchers respond to contemporary social and ecological crises that are deep, interlaced, and systemic in nature. LSRI is framed by principles that include embracing diverse communities of thought and action, encompassing all branches of science and wisdom traditions, with special emphasis on giving voice to impoverished and marginalized societies that consistently face unequal and disproportionately dire consequences from climate-related disruption. A systemic, extended temporal perception and response to climate change that incorporates multiple ways of seeing and knowing will be vital to establish and protect human rights and social justice in the Anthropocene. We are now exploring details of programmatic interaction.
From these affiliations, we believe new communities of practice will rise, new voices will be heard, and new advancements made of significant benefit to our sponsors and members as well as to the public at large. Each and in concert exemplify a principle shared across all of CLIR’s programs: to bring new life to knowledge by design.
Charles Henry
President
Council on Library and Information Resources
1800 Diagonal Road, Suite 600
Alexandria, VA 22314
contact@clir.org
CLIR is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning.
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