 Good morning. In Washington, we usually respond, good morning. I'm David Ferriero. I'm the Archivist of the United States, and it's a real pleasure to welcome you to my house this morning. And a special welcome to those who are joining us by webcast. And I know there are a number of library schools around the country who are participating, and it's a real pleasure to welcome you, especially those folks in Boston. Hello, Simmons. This is a fitting place for this meeting. This is a house that holds history, and I believe today we're making history, so it's very appropriate that we're all here together. I won't acknowledge two very special people this morning. We wouldn't be here if Bob D'Arton of Harvard hadn't taken this on as a personal cause. And I have firsthand information from my five years at the New Republic Library, where Bob is a trustee. And the conversations that we had about doing something here in this country, Bob, thank you very much for getting us started. And another very important person is Doran Weber and all the folks from Sloan who saw the importance of this and actually put money to where we were going and actually made this possible. So Doran and all of you at Sloan, thank you very much. We are lucky to have with us, I have to get the term right since this is new to me, graphic recorders. Martha McGinnis and Heather Clark on either side are capturing what's happening today graphically, which is just wonderful. So keep your eyes on that. Special thanks. We had the work streams met yesterday at George Washington University, a very productive day. And we want to thank Karim Baguda for making that possible. Thank you, Karim. Thank you all of the DPLA team, the secretariat, and the steering committee for making yesterday such a productive day. I'm high on DPLA and you'll hear more from me in the next session, but it's a real special treat to be here this morning. And a real special treat to introduce a new member of the administration who came back to Washington just before I did in August 2009. Jim Leach, who is the chair of the Endowment for the Humanities, Jim served 30 years in Congress. And as I reminded him this morning, we have his records upstairs. So Jim Leach. Thank you, David. And I want to tell a story I told David about a few months ago, but we had a meeting at the NEH a few months back. And someone came up to me and said some of the nicest things that have ever been said to me. And I was kind of blushing. And then the person looked up and said, you are the archivist, aren't you? So I am in David's shadow. In any way, I'd like to join this revolutionary throng in thanking David and the National Archives for hosting this meeting and make a few observations from NEH's perspective. NEH is in the knowledge development and dissemination business. At the heart of our work is concerned for the recording of accumulated knowledge of the past and for facilitating research in the future. From our perspective, we're concerned that the concept of research is increasingly being co-opted by science at a time when humanistic understanding has never been more important. We are full bore in support of scientific endeavor, but we also think it critical to prioritize idea exploration and access to the wisdom of the ages. Half a century ago, the English physicist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered a controversial lecture at Cambridge called The Two Cultures, in which he lamented the gulf between scientist in a group he described as literary intellectuals. He cited several examples, scientists who had hardly read dickens and humanists who couldn't define the second law of thermodynamics. At the risk of exaggeration, the gulf might be described as illiteracy matching enumeracy in the citadels of academia. But however defined, Snow held that the breakdown of communications between the sciences and the humanities hindered solutions to social problems. Assuming some legitimacy to Snow's contention, what is the situation five decades later? In many ways, the science humanities division is more extreme today, as physics has become more math dependent, biology and chemistry more complex and scientific inquiries more theoretical. Nevertheless, from a methodological perspective, the technological revolution began with the digital computer, which by the way was discovered at Iowa State University, allows the humanities and sciences to share an increasing portion of common ground. Digitization of a myriad of objects and billions of pages of books and manuscripts enables the application of scientific methods to vast amounts of social science data. Likewise, digital technology and the internet give scientists an open window into the humanities. As a consequence, the social harm of our times is the emergence of a new digital class characterized less by occupation, birth, geographic location and the science humanity divide than by an individual's degree of curiosity, diligence and access to digital technology. The important division in the new communications age is no longer the one between science and the humanities. It is in the first instance a grog golf between those who have crossed the digital divide and those who by choice lack of access or capacity of not. And in the second, between those who seek information from diverse sources with an open-minded perspective and those who choose to rely on single dimension purveyors of views. The question of whether a torturing world will cause greater understanding and social integration at the community and international level or lead to greater intolerance and social splintering is yet to be resolved. What is clear is that few revolutions in history can match the democratizing consequences for individual learning of the development spread of digital communications devices and the software capacities that fueled use of such hardware. Since the enlightenment, the issue of equality has been looked upon as a political ideal tied to techniques of social organization and governmental policies at the moment. But in the modern world, access to knowledge is becoming a central to advancing social equality and opportunity across the globe. As access to the ballot box has proven to be the key to advancing political rights. There have been prior revolutions in the democratization of ideas, the development of marks and combination of letters to represent words, the invention of paper and the printing press, the establishment of schools, especially public schools of libraries and universities have been seminal stages in human progress. The concept of establishing in the public domain an easily accessible digital repository of a vast conglomeration of written material and created matter appears to be a logical extension of these prior revolutions. We don't know precisely how such an institution will be organized, managed, governed or how it will progress, particularly given the thorny copyright issues that exist. We don't know what to call the enterprise, whether it will maintain a mouthful label like National Digital Library or acquiesce to a shorthand monitor like Die Lab or Nat Lib. We don't know how the cost burden of the effort will be shared between corporations, the nonprofit community and governmental bodies. Although I do know or understand that shortly we're gonna hear from a 21st century reincarnation of James Ms. Smithson. You'll hear about that later. What we do know is that whatever the cost, collective storage is far cheaper and user-friendly than localized efforts with diverse standards and methodologies. Last evening at the White House, we enrolled before a gathering of law students, a documentary the NIH finance called Freedom Writers that has recently won three Emmys. After showing the film about young civil rights pioneers who were beaten and imprisoned in 1961 for standing up to Jim Crow laws and Dixie, the audience was given the chance to interview several who led and participated in the civil disobedience. Diane Nash, the chief organizer of the rides when a student at Fisk University was asked what she and others thought they would achieve when they started out. Her response was instructive. She said they really didn't know. All they did know was that it was the right thing to do. I feel a little bit the same about what Bob Darden, John Palfrey and Jim Billington and all of you assembled here today are so committed to achieving. Despite knowing exactly what to expect, facilitating this revolutionary advance and the democratization of ideas may be the greatest no-brainer policy option. This great center of democracy is confronted with at this fractious time in our politics. Just as we need an infrastructure of roads and bridges, we need an infrastructure of ideas. Thank you. Hi, everybody. It's a pleasure to be here on behalf of the Sloan Foundation and to participate in the first ever public plenary meeting on the creation of a digital public library of America. I'm fiddling with the microphone here. It's gratifying to see such an impressive group of leaders and experts here from many great libraries, both academic and public, from cultural institutions, government agencies, technology companies, think tanks, NGOs, foundations, and people who care about education, literacy and community. Thank you also to the DPLA Steering Committee and to the DPLA Secretary at the Berkman Center, so ably steered by John Palfrey and more marks. And a special thank you to our host, David Ferriero and his team at the National Archives. Although we've been working on the DPLA concept for exactly one year, and people have been talking about and striving towards an integrated digital library system for over 15 years, today we're officially announcing the biggest, broadest, deepest, and most coordinated effort yet to make the stream library system a reality. The digital revolution may have rendered the traditional library insufficient for the digital age, but it's also given us the digital tools, the worldwide web, mass digitization, link data and interoperability, virtual clouds, to create a new paradigm where people can go to access all the information and the knowledge that human civilization has to offer online, while preserving the physical library as a center for community, citizenship, education, and empowerment. The Digital Public Library of America was created to help us make this paradigm shift at an October 2011 meeting hosted by Robert Darnton at the Radcliffe Institute and supported by the Sloan Foundation, which had previously supported the Library of Congress, the Internet Archive, Lyricist, and Wikipedia in its efforts to advance universal access to knowledge. Participants at this seminal meeting agreed to work together toward the creation of, quote, an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation's living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in the current and future generations. The meeting generated enormous excitement and energy. In December, Sloan gave the Berkman Center at Harvard a planning grant to act as a secretariat for this effort, and by January 2012, a Blue Ribbon Steering Committee had been formed and an active Wiki and discussion lists serve created. In March, the first meeting on content and scope, one of six work streams was held at Harvard's Berkman Center. In April, DPLA engaged with many funders and secured additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Open Society Institute with strong interest from several other funders. In May, DPLA held a workshop in Amsterdam on linked data and interoperability, and also met with the Europeana about ways we might work together. DPLA also announced a beta sprint to develop a working prototype. In June, DPLA held another workshop at the Library of Congress on Technical Architecture and the Sloan Foundation approved an $836,000 grant to support the legal work stream of the DPLA initiative by developing solutions to copyright law obstacles facing public library initiatives. By July, over 40 series submissions for the beta sprint were received, and in September, an expert review panel selected the most promising candidates for development. And today, we're announcing the beginning of an intensive two year grassroots process to build a concrete work plan for a national digital library system to develop a functional technical prototype into pilot content digitization efforts. So DPLA has accomplished a lot in one year. Our discussion list serve now has over a thousand members, and you see the major leaders in this room today, but much remains to be done. For example, some people still ask, what exactly is the DPLA? Well, what we're talking about is a common format and a shared platform to facilitate discovery and exposure of our rich digital heritage content. Amazing collections that exist at our great participating institutions is one example, like the Library of Congress, the National Archives and the Smithsonian, Harvard, Michigan and Stanford Universities, the Boston Public Library, the Enoch Pratt Public Library, the State Library of Texas, the San Francisco Public Library, the Hottie Trust and the Internet Archive. We're also talking about K to 12 education, including letting teachers connect with other teachers to create a syllabus, and letting students find a topic to write about from trusted sources. We're talking about empowering people in community colleges and retirement homes. We're talking about practical tasks, like looking for employment, planning a vacation, renovating your house, looking up your genealogy. We're talking about local historic societies with a wealth of unique collections. We're talking about shared code and interoperable data and cooperative collection building with other nations in Europe and Asia and Africa and Latin America. We're talking about mobile apps and social media sites, and we're talking about books from unpacking the long tail to maybe even best sellers if we can work out a deal with publishers such as an extended collective license, and also about pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, images, recordings, videos, and much, much more. The Digital Public Library of America is a big, bold idea for our digital age, a collaborative public-private effort to support and complement our existing library system and to enhance access to knowledge for people everywhere. Today, the Sloan Foundation is pleased to announce that our Board of Trustees has just approved a new $2.5 million grant in support of the DPLA initiative over the next two years. Thank you. That grant has been matched by our good friends at the Arcadia Foundation with another $2.5 million. I would now like to call up Peter Baldwin to take a well-deserved call. I will be brief, but I'm willing to bet that there are very few people in this room who have ever heard of the Arcadia Fund until this very moment. We're not a big foundation like the Sloan or the Mellon, but we share a lot of interest in common with them, and one of these is digitization. We've been working on digitization projects now for several years. We've collaborated, among other things, with Bob D'Arton at Harvard. We've worked together with UCLA. We have a project with the National Library of Israel. We are cooperating with the Hill Foundation. We would be cooperating, and we're trying to cooperate with the Internet Archives. Only we could persuade Brewster finally to send us his bank details. So we're hoping for something on that front as well. But all of these, of course, are, one could say, sort of boutique digitization projects. So it is with particular pleasure that we're able to stand here today and be part of this move of the digitization project to a new level, to its Walmart phase. We're delighted. We're delighted to be able to punch above our weight in present company. Thank you very much for letting us be part of this. We think this is a project that, if it is successful, really could change things. Thank you.