The TFAO Digital Library: A vision of the future for TFAO

The TFAO Digital Library

A Vision of the Future for TFAO

TFAO seeks to find an existing nonprofit organization to absorb its functions over the next five years in order to provide:

For the public

further in-depth education in American art outside of traditional establishments 1
affordability in art education

For the enterprise

a guarantee of long term continuity of mission
extension, evolution and acceleration of programs

Absorption may be accomplished through an initial exclusive license of operations, followed in time by acquisition.

TFAO conducts the following programs:

Advocacy:

Awards for excellence in scholarship
Conservation of art collections
Establishment of art museums
Exhibition and touring of private art collections
Online educational programming

Financial assistance:

Conversion of analog text to digital files and online publication of scholarly texts for museums
Transcription of podcast MP3 or MP4 files to text and online publication for museums
Placement of dedicated computers in physical libraries
Recording and streaming of video and audio content for museums

Operations:

Digitizing analog text content with copyright permissions
Expansion and maintenance of digital library, its catalogs and publications
Guidance to arts organizations in using the Internet for education
Guidance to museums on options for distributing, licensing and monetizing proprietary intellectual property

Research:

Analysis of methods, ranking systems, and human assets deployment regarding selection and digital processing of out of copyright, out of print / in copyright, and in print / in copyright texts (in the context of obtaining permissions from copyright holders)
Development of new online publications in specialty areas
Liaison with other non profit organizations for systematic approach to funding online services
Study of current and upcoming digitization initiatives to facilitate optimal allocation of digital library resources and to avoid redundancy
Study of processes, costs and relative benefits of methods and sources for audio and video production, digitization and streaming

Note

1. Of interest is a quote from a 12/01/2005 Weekly Standard article, "Is it the future of college?" by Ross Douthat:

Thanks to the internet, we've entered an age where a college education doesn't need to be as constrained, in time and space, as it did in the age before streaming video and online libraries. The old-fashioned campus experience--the leafy quads and wood-paneled classrooms, the dorm-room arguments and late-night pub crawls--may be the ideal way to experience college, but it's neither available nor well-suited to the needs of most Americans. As public financial aid diminishes, it's prohibitively expensive for the public colleges in most states to enroll, house, and provide lecture halls to accommodate every student who wants a degree. And the traditional four-year residential model of college doesn't fit the needs of those students whose attempts to balance work and higher education usually require giving up on the latter, leading to what the Times described last year as a growing "college drop-out boom."

A more democratic model of higher education, then, might involve shifting federal and state dollars away from the large state schools, with their vast resources and their "beer-and-circus" atmosphere--and perhaps away from old-fashioned brick-and-mortar campuses altogether. This isn't how our mandarins usually think about democratizing college: When American liberals imagine expanding access to higher education, they tend to envision a wave of working-class achievers sweeping over the picturesque lawns of a Princeton or a Duke. But while elite schools ought to be doing more to diversify the class composition of their student bodies, the average degree-seeking American twentysomething will benefit more from a system of higher ed that's streamlined and flexible--that lets him work and take classes at the same time, watch lectures from home and read assignments online, graduate in 15 months or 5 years--than from all the financial aid dollars that an Ivy League school can muster.

Inevitably, such extension-school and distance-learning models of higher ed will be geared more toward practical training than toward the traditional liberal arts, and more likely to introduce a working-class striver to Peter Drucker and computer science than to Plato and the New Historicism. But even though the debate over the design of a liberal arts curriculum is important, it's also essentially an elite debate, affecting only a fraction of the nation's college-going population. The nation's "liberal arts college students," two college presidents recently pointed out, would "fit easily inside a Big Ten football stadium: fewer than 100,000 students out of more than 14 million." Whereas more than half of American undergrads are part-time students, and a third hold down full-time jobs. This is the population that any "public" system of higher education should be designed to serve--even if it means accepting some internet-age alterations to our nostalgic, groves-of-academe notions of what a "college education" ought to look like.

Ross Douthat is an associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly, the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard.

rev. 12/16/05

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