In a recently published article in the EDUCAUSE Review (http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/RepatriationReconstr... ), Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, grapples with the complex issue of repatriation of cultural artifacts from museums and argues that the responsibilities of stewardship extend to capturing and distributing high quality digital surrogates that can ensure continuing scholarly access to artifacts of disputed ownership and morally ambivalent provenance.

We look forward to having Cliff at the 2008 Museums and the Web conference, where he has agreed to sum up the meeting and react to it in the closing plenary. His opinion and expertise in matters of higher education networking is internationally respected and over the years, Clifford has been an interested and sympathetic observer of the affairs of museums. Occasionally, as in the planning for the Art Museum Image Consortium, Clifford has become directly involved in museum matters. I am excited that we are going to re-engage him in thinking about strategies for museum networking at what I consider a crucial time.

I see museums and scholars as neighbors in the world of cultural heritage informatics. Like most neighbors, they don’t always share common purposes. I am often critical of the imperialistic tendencies and myopia of libraries and scholars when it comes to respecting the needs and interests of museums. Too often, those in the library and scholarly information community simply ignore the different traditions and missions of museums and assume that museums are just libraries holding realia instead of books. Fortunately, Cliff Lynch is sensitive to these matters, though he does represent the interests of the scholarly information community.

I found it interesting, therefore, to read Cliff’s take on the matter of repatriation and its implications for scholarly information because when I reflect on the demands for repatriation and the role of rich digital surrogates, I see an opportunity for museums to seize the initiative and engage the communities and nations from which the objects in their care originated, by making available digital surrogates and inviting commentary to obtain perspectives on their collections that they might otherwise not have heard. Only incidentally, and secondarily, do I think this will have benefits to scholars. Of course, if museums succeed in engaging those in the community that created their collection objects, the benefits to scholars will be greater than having merely made their resources available as rich digital surrogates. In that case, the scholars will benefit additionally from indigenous commentary and cross-cultural interpretation.

What is at stake here is subtle, but I think it is crucial. First, because I doubt museums will be inspired to make digital surrogates by the arguments advanced in Cliff’s EDUCASE Review article. And secondly, because I think museums do understand engaging communities and will create richer resources if they come to appreciate how those communities might be attracted. This is the reason I’ve been so interested of late in the potentials of location-aware infrastructures that will enable museums to publish to those who are at a geographical location, the holdings of museums worldwide that relate to the place they are physically in. I see in this emerging technical infrastructure a set of cultural services that could dramatically transform the ability of museums to interact with the people who authored their cultural collections and in whose environs the specimens in their natural history collections are, or were, native. As a consequence, I view the potential of digital repatriation less as a responsibility of stewards to scholars than as an opportunity for museums to engage broader audiences.

When we invited Cliff to address us at Museums and the Web in April, it was because this difference in perspective between those like Cliff who start with the values of scholarship and others, like me, who believe strongly in scholarly communication but proceed from the missions of museums, seems to be leading to different foci in standards development and digital networking strategies. I am looking forward to having Cliff with us for several days to help us bridge these emerging differences so that we can build a universe of networked knowledge together and at the same time serve the needs of the institutions, including museums, that participate in it.