John Unsworth chaired the ACLS Commission that authored Our Cultural Commonwealth. In a conversation with Kevin Guthrie, he offers his own well-developed definition of cyberinfrastructure, talks about why and how the needs of the humanities should be considered separately, and explains how the report's framework has been useful already in developing new implementation strategies.

Provost O'Donnell, author of Avatars of the Word, is fascinated by how "institutions full of creative, innovative, iconoclastic people" are paradoxically "bastions of conservatism." Guiding us through the texture of change since the Internet hit 15 years ago, O"Donnell posits that incremental change is perhaps the best we can do until the fundamental instruments of scholarly communication and the academic reward structure change: "until the problem we have to solve is defined persuasively enough that we get enough people interested in solving it."

The architect of digital policy at the Getty Trust shares his conviction that building the digital "content infrastructure" depends on the contributions of thousands of smaller institutions that individually lack human and technological resources necessary for the task. Cyberinfrastructure could facilitate distributed cataloging and much wider distribution of museum holdings that would have a major impact on scholarship and teaching. However, a significant challenge remains that of the muddying of museums’ educational mission with notions of gatekeeping and income generation from the objects in their care.