In the United States, the only similar institution is the Inter-University Consortium for Political andSocial Research (ICPSR), established in 1962. There is no direct equivalent of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS),mentioned in the UK Data Archive description and founded in 1996 as a “UK national service aiding the discovery, creation andpreservation of digital resources in and for research, teaching and learning in the arts and humanities.”
The lack of a similar coordinated effort in the United States is troubling, and even in the national context,support for humanities and social science research is dwarfed by other governmental spending commitments. Health research accountsfor more than half of federal spending on basic (nondefense) research: the National Institutes of Health’s budget request infiscal year 2006 was about $28.5 billion. The National Science Foundation budget, which provides some funding for the socialsciences and almost none for the humanities, was $5.6 billion. Of that amount, about 10%, or $509 million, went to the Directoratefor Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), which until recently had the primary responsibility forcyberinfrastructure. (The CISE budget also funds NSF’s portfolio of basic research in the computer and information sciences and relatedareas.) The NSF now has an Office of Cyberinfrastructure, which will guide the agency's investments in cyberinfrastructure forscience and engineering, funded at $123 million. Federal funding for humanities-related projects is tiny by comparison. Thefiscal-year 2006 budget requests of the most important agencies—the National Endowment for the Humanities ($138 million) and theInstitute of Museum and Library Services ($247 million)—combined equal less than the budget for CISE, which is itself only one-tenthof the NSF budget. And the ability of the NEA, NEH, and IMLS to fund cyberinfrastructure directly is diminished because much of themoney in these agency budgets goes to states through block grants over which the agencies have little control.
Private foundations are important sources of support in the humanities and the social sciences, but they cannotmake up for the low level of federal funding. For example, no single private foundation in the United States—with the exceptionof the Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation, which primarily funds health initiatives—has annual funding that equals the budget of CISE.
New federal funding is urgently needed for cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences and alsofor research and demonstration projects that explore new, sustainable business models for digital humanities and socialscience. Received wisdom on the limits of the market for ideas has been radically reoriented by the rise of networked communities,and, at this point, scholarly communication may well stand to lose more by failing to experiment than from experiments that fail.Universities need to connect with commercial information-technology innovators in order to understand these new information markets,experiment with business models, and think creatively about the value that is produced by research and teaching in the humanitiesand social sciences. In fact, corporate supporters and partners have played an important, often foundational, role at campus-basedtechnology and media laboratories such as the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon; the School of Literature,Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab; the Entertainment TechnologyCenter at the University of Southern California; and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University ofVirginia. Commercial partners in these ventures may understand better than their academic counterparts how to communicate value tothose who will pay for it, and academic institutions may understand better than their commercial counterparts how to ensure that valueis not only circulated in the present but handed down in the future. There is a public interest even in privately held culturalmaterials, so it is inevitable that some difficult issues will arise where public and private meet; yet the creation of a robustcyberinfrastructure will require vigorous collaboration across this boundary.