Below is an excerpt from Indiana University President Michael A. McRobbie’s State of the University address, delivered Tuesday, October 1, 2013. This excerpt discusses the time-based media digitization project highlighted in the following post.

For over 25 centuries, the great universities of the world have always had three fundamental missions: the creation of knowledge (that is, research and innovation), the dissemination of knowledge (that is, education and learning), and the preservation of knowledge.

We tend, these days, to mainly associate the first two of these missions with a university. These have been my focus in my six previous State of the University speeches. However, the advent of the digital age, with the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web, is giving renewed rapidly increasing focus to the importance of the third mission of a university—the preservation of knowledge—and is allowing us to think about it in completely new ways. Thus, in this speech, I want to dwell on this mission in some detail.

Previously, the preservation of knowledge—thought of in the broadest way to include not just material from books and journals, but collections of other objects (and their vital meta-data) such as photos, paintings, prints, sculptures, cultural objects, sound recordings, video, film, scientific data—was the almost exclusive preserve of the library and museum. It is this accumulated knowledge, in all its immensity and complexity, that provides the fundamental and essential foundation for the first two missions of a university—for research and for education. But access to this knowledge has often been place-dependent and it has not been broadly accessible or shareable.

Suddenly, all knowledge, even in this broad sense, is in principle digitizable in at least some form, and hence can be made accessible and shared and transmitted over the Internet. It is only limited by data storage and the data transfer capacity of networks, and of course, the ability to find it via search.

Likewise, vast amounts of material at Indiana University, which had been patiently accumulated and curated over decades, can, again in principle, be made instantly and inexpensively available in digital form at any time not only to students, scholars and scientists throughout IU, but across the country and around the world. The digitization and accessibility over the Internet of this type of material, is now essential throughout the academy. There is no academic area, from anthropology to zoology, that has not, to greater or lesser degree, become highly digital. Data is being generated, collected, processed, analyzed, visualized and stored in digital form. Simulations and modeling are being carried out completely digitally. And the historical and contemporary archives of nearly all areas of scholarship, certainly the main material, have been converted fully into digital form.

Such digital material is also vital to fully realizing the promise of online education. It is essential that all the material on which online instruction in a course or degree is based, be all available digitally if the online student is to be freed from the limits of an education fixed in space and time. And, of course, it makes every type of “blended” residential and on-line education possible.

All of these collections also represent the investment, over many decades, of the people of the State of Indiana, the federal government, foundations and businesses in research and scholarship at IU, as well as the generosity of donors who have entrusted vital and irreplaceable collections to IU. And the new vast amounts of born-digital data being generated today represent their continuing investment. The digitization of these legacy collections ensures that all of this material will be made available to the broadest possible audience and that it is preserved in perpetuity. In this sense, it fully maximizes the value of all these collections to the IU community, the state, and beyond in the digital age.

It is also the collections of such objects, many of which will continue to evolve in size as will the scholarly dialog concerning them, that also define the character, values and heritage of an institution like IU. These “assets” also provide a key element in institutional differentiation for us and they underpin and buttress some of our key academic strengths.

IU has, in fact, been a major national leader in large-scale and wide-ranging digitization projects for over 20 years.