Building Knowledge Societies

Dr. Robert S. Martin
Director
Institute of Museum and Library Services
UNESCO High Level Symposium
December 9, 2003

Distinguished ambassadors, ministers, excellencies, ladies, and gentlemen. I am delighted to be part of the official U.S. delegation to the World Summit on the Information Society. I share my colleagues' sense of excitement and commitment on this occasion as we explore ways to move from vision to action in building knowledge societies.

I was privileged to participate in October's ministerial level roundtable, "Towards Knowledge Societies," and to contribute to the ministerial communiqué coming out of that meeting. I continue to endorse UNESCO's goals of advancing learning, ensuring human rights, preserving our cultural heritage, promoting cultural diversity, and championing the principles of universal access to information.

I direct the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), an independent Federal agency that is the primary source of federal grants for museums and libraries in the United States of America. IMLS helps to shape policy and practice among our 122,000 libraries and 15,000 museums, specifically in the areas of capacity-building, lifelong learning, the development and dissemination of new digital technologies, cultural preservation, and civic engagement. Our grants and programs support core museum and library services, encourage excellence, and leverage substantial local, state, and private resources. We recognize that, as agencies dedicated to education, museums and libraries can play a central role in the building of a knowledge society.

This afternoon, I'd like to discuss some of the "drivers for change" that are transforming libraries and museums. Then I'd like to suggest some strategies for enabling cultural institutions to play a more vital role in the knowledge society.

Steven Jay Gould talks about evolution in terms of punctuated equilibrium where periods of relative calm are punctuated by periods of rapid change. We are in a period of rapid change, and three of those drivers for change are: the need for lifelong learning, the possibilities of digital technology, and the importance of demonstrating public value.

First, the need for lifelong learning. Today, global prosperity and individual productivity depend upon the ability to learn constantly, to adapt to change readily, and to evaluate information critically. In this information rich world, we must remain committed to fair and equitable access, and we must create and facilitate ways to transform information into knowledge.

We have both a need to learn and the capacity for learning throughout the lifetime. We have long believed that education primarily happens in the school, with out of school learning being less important, less organized, and less effective. But, in fact, the need for learning is constant throughout one's lifetime. It neither begins nor ends at the schoolhouse door. Advances in the science of learning demonstrate that we can and do learn when we are infants and when we're 85.

I believe in the emergence of a triad for learning where the importance of learning in the community or home and in the workplace will take equal importance to learning in school.

Today's communities demand attention to civic engagement, where diverse interests can be encouraged and addressed and where diverse people can discover shared values and interests. Democracy demands the engagement of its citizens and depends on their wise counsel.

Today's workplace demands employees with higher levels of knowledge and skills; skills become outdated at an accelerating rate.

Today's schools demand higher levels of student achievement. The job is too big to be done by the schools alone.

In all three of these areas learners need to be able to call on the powerful resources of museums and libraries. And museums and libraries need to be able to respond appropriately.

A second driver of change is digital technology. Digital technology enables the full range of holdings in our museums, libraries, and archives - audio, video, documents, artifacts - to be catalogued, organized, combined in new ways, and made accessible to audiences as never before. The magnificent scientific, historic, aesthetic, and cultural resources in our libraries and museums can be presented - both within and across institutions -- within a matrix of interpretive and didactic materials that enriches meaning and increases the audience's understanding. New ICT initiatives allow learners to access more than our museum and library collections - they can bring learners" face to face" electronically with curators, scientists, artists, and scholars. ICT-based learning initiatives can also recognize and address individual and localized learning needs through customized programming and presentation.

The third driver is the importance of demonstrating public value. In a world where the public demands accountability, where no institution is guaranteed unquestioned support, where there is increased competition from across the public, private, government, and commercial realms, no museum or library can simply assume continued public support. Our institutions therefore face increasing pressures to be entrepreneurial, innovative, strategic, and customer-focused.

These drivers call for new strategies for cultural institutions:

First, we need to know what business we're in. Navigating these changes requires clarity of vision and mission, and a re-examination of our core goals. It demands new models of leadership and governance that are attuned to broader social, technological, political, educational, and community realities. We need new awareness of what we are trying to achieve. We need to ask more than, "Are we building strong libraries and museums?" We need to ask, "Are our museums and libraries helping to build stronger communities?"

Second, we need shared standards. It is essential to continue to promote shared standards and frameworks that facilitate access to the resources in our museums and libraries. IMLS has been an active partner in the international Digital Cultural Forum, and we continue to work with other international partners to support applied research and to develop frameworks that help to build, preserve, and provide access to digital collections. In the United States, we supported the development of a Framework of Guidance in Building Good Digital Collections, which was issued in 2002.

Third, we need to plan with, not for, our learning audiences. We need to assess learner needs in new ways and deliver our services in different ways. We need to structure different kinds of services for different kinds of learners.

Fourth, we need to collaborate - It is clear that the 21st century strategy is partnership. The potential for bold learning partnerships, rooted in America's communities, offers unprecedented challenges and opportunities. Our agency, for example, is working with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to facilitate new partnerships among libraries, museums, and broadcasting stations. This is collaboration that is not so much "joined at the hip" partnership, but recognition of intersecting nodes of interest, activity, and mission. In this and in many other arenas, we are witnessing the creation of new networks of relationships addressing broader educational and cultural concerns.

That leads to my final point: we need to be open to new organizational models. As our institutions consider the challenges around them - and seek to address them effectively - we are witnessing significant strategic restructuring throughout the cultural sector. Old distinctions between institutions are blurring and even disappearing. New entities - from formal partnerships, consortia, and merged organizations, to entirely new museum and library forms -- are being created to meet the needs of today and tomorrow.

The future demands that we think about our communities as holistic environments, as social ecosystems in which our cultural organizations are part of an integrated whole. Through recognizing current realities, imagining future possibilities, and maintaining our values of learning, human rights, cultural diversity, and equitable access, I believe that we can contribute to fostering the growth of the collaborative spirit and create true knowledge societies.

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