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.

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.