rather than trying for new initiatives. You have the money for new initiatives, is that correct?

Mr. HACKNEY. That is true, though as a long time administrator, I have this philosophy that even in the worst of times, you can't go into the bomb shelter, to go back to your metaphor. It's better rather than going into the bomb shelter to skip and hop across the neutral ground and try to dodge the bombs and to do things a bit differently so that you don't die intellectually, that you keep serving new audiences. But it's a minor difference between us there. Preservation is the basic thing.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Skaggs.

Mr. SKAGGS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning.

Mr. HACKNEY. Good morning.

Mr. SKAGGS. Sorry to be late. I was up with one of our Judiciary Committee subcommittees testifying about another silly idea for amending the Constitution. But I won't bore you with that. Perhaps you can have a National Conversation about it. Mr. SKEEN [presiding]. Thank you, Mr. Skaggs.

RESTRUCTURING AND BECOMING MORE ENTREPRENEURIAL

Mr. SKAGGS. I appreciate the stamina that you and your colleagues at the Endowment have had to demonstrate over the last few months. Other than survival, I wanted to invite you to just extemporize on one or two of the most important things you have gotten done during this period of time.

Mr. HACKNEY. We realize that we have to operate differently, so in the process of cutting our size down, we have taken advantage of the situation to bring together programs in a different configuration, if you will, so that similar programs are now housed together administratively. The most important reconfiguration is in the new Research and Education division, which now has almost all of the activities that deal directly with basic research in the humanities. I think that's been a gain.

We have had to think about our core processes. That's still going on. We need to be able to operate very efficiently.

The one innovation that I think is most promising is the creation of the Enterprise Office, which has the task of sponsoring or managing all of the programs within the Endowment that cut across divisional lines, across bureaucratic lines, if you will. Let me give you an example. This is more important than it sounds. This is also the entrepreneurial arm of the Endowment. It is looking for partners outside the agency that can bring resources to help us reach different audiences and broader audiences with the same materials. But inside the Endowment, we have not before this had a way of handling proposals that contained activities that were, let us say, preservation and research and a public program, proposals that did not fit easily within a single program division of the Endowment.

With the Enterprise Office, we will now have an office that will be able to create to handcraft, if you will-a review mechanism and a way of judging and coming to terms with a proposal. For instance, a project that might digitize a collection of humanities materials but to transform those materials, those texts, or that manuscript collection into a teaching program on a CD-ROM, and to

make that CD-ROM available to schools, which is an educational effort, and also to make it more available to the public, which is a public program. That single project would run the gamut from a preservation program to an education program, a research program, and a public program.

So now we have a way of handling that application process smoothly. I think that is going to be a great benefit.

UPCOMING NEH PROJECTS AND PROGRAMS

Mr. SKAGGS. I appreciate the intramural and process changes. I need also to be able to answer the question raised at a town meeting in Boulder, Colorado, or more likely in Arvada, Colorado, "What's the Endowment done for me lately?" What difference has it made in the lives of people? What have you gotten done extramurally over the last year?

Mr. HACKNEY. Well, the Teaching with Technology program that I think is one of the more promising new thrusts, which we've just been talking about. The National Conversation also has been going forward with renewed energy and continuing energy. There is a film that is meant to be quite stimulating with regard to the American identity that is being finished now that will be available for broadcast either in late spring or early fall that will be, I think, quite good. I've seen some of the rough cuts of it. In various ways even with fewer funds, we've tried to be as imaginative as we can be.

There will also be broadcast next fall a couple of documentary film series that I think are going to be extremely effective and popular. One on the history of the American West that is being done by Ken Burns, and the other on The Great War, World War I, that is, that I think is a documentary series that will have immense appeal nationally, and will deepen our understanding of our history.

NATIONAL IMPORTANCE OF NEH

Mr. SKAGGS. As you know, one of the things that I believe to be among your core missions and one of the things that there is simply no other entity that is in a position to carry out has to do with preservation of our heritage of historical documents, newspapers in particular, the work that you do in primary source material, the papers of our founders and important early public figures. I think that story bears repeating and explaining again why those projects and any others that you might like to add won't happen without a national entity bringing together a critical mass of funding and scholarship.

Mr. HACKNEY. I agree. It is just true that there is no other source of funds for those sorts of relatively unglamorous but quite necessary preservation and editing work that will make our understanding of our past much richer in the future and that will be available to students and scholars for a long time to come. There is no other national source for such support than the NEH.

Private donors are not likely to be able to stick with a project or program for 20 years. The Jefferson papers for example, have been going that long. There's very little public relations benefit from that for a corporate foundation, for instance. Yet it is fundamentally important work, and it must be done. It takes exacting schol

arship over a number of years before those things come to fruition in a book or a CD-ROM.

It also is expensive and goes beyond the capacity or the interest of most private donors and foundations, frankly, to fund a project over a period of years that is relatively expensive in relation to the output, though the output is critically important.

LOSING GROUND IN PRESERVATION EFFORT

Mr. SKAGGS. Are we gaining or losing ground on the preservation of 18th and 19th century newspaper and journals

Mr. HACKNEY. At the current level of funding, that is, 110 million dollars, I think we'll be losing ground. Let me ask George Farr to comment a bit.

Mr. FARR. Yes. We will be losing ground. For instance

Mr. SKAGGS. By that, I mean some of these papers will no longer exist in the form that is copyable and therefore will no longer be accessible to any kind of general audience.

Mr. FARR. One can infer that, because we are focusing on those papers that are most at risk because of the acidic content of the paper. For instance, this year at our reduced level, there will be 20,000 fewer brittle books that will be microfilmed as a result of the cut this year. Chairman Hackney mentioned this earlier, and also the fact that 230,000 disintegrating newspaper pages will also not be microfilmed.

So you could say that we are losing ground in that way.

BALANCING NATIONAL NEEDS IN THE HUMANITIES

Mr. SKAGGS. Help me with this because at least at my level of understanding, whereas you probably can't get significant foundation or private philanthropy and support of that preservation activity, arguably the Ken Burns series on the West, with the kind of profile that he now commands, could be funded other ways. How do you strike the right balance, given that nobody else is going to be doing this, and if it's gone, it's gone forever?

Mr. HACKNEY. That is also a very tough question. We pursue a philosophy of having a balanced program in the humanities. That is, we support basic research and other scholarly efforts like these preservation projects. We support education projects that improve the education experience that students receive at the school level and the college level. And, we support public programs. I think this balance is probably the right philosophy. But it does bring to mind several issues that you've raised.

One issue is: Can't Ken Burns find private funds to do his work? Well, he is the most visible documentary film maker now operating in the non-profit world. But even he says repeatedly and very strongly that he can not find corporate support that will allow him to do the films in the way that he wants to do them, that is, very thoroughly and based on a high level of scholarship. It's a very expensive undertaking. Without both the funds that the NEH provides and also the imprimatur of quality that our review system provides, he could not find the corporate support even to do his films. He is the only one, although Henry Hampton may be close, and there may be a few others that are recognizable in the profes

sional community, but very few have the sort of recognition that Burns has.

If we were not there operating in the public programs area funding documentaries, we would not be able to find the next Ken Burns. He started with very modest NEH grants and built up his skill level and also his recognition. There are other Ken Burns out there who are going to enrich our understanding and experience of American history. Where are they going to get their start if we're not there to help them?

Mr. SKAGGS. Where are they going to get their original source material if we don't preserve them?

Mr. HACKNEY. Exactly. That's right. There is a fundamental level here. You might say why doesn't NEH do only those things that nobody else would do those things that are invisible and unglamorous, the scut work of the humanities basically, that nobody else is going to do-and leave the glamorous stuff, the documentaries to someone else? Well, I think other people wouldn't do the documentaries at the same level of quality.

But it is also a reality of life that unless people in Ohio and other places understand what we do, the political support for keeping NEH going will not be there. That's why having some programs that the public can participate in and understand and that enrich their lives is really quite important for us.

Mr. SKAGGS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. SKEEN. Thank you. Mr. Yates?

BOOK PRESERVATION IN OTHER NATIONS

Mr. YATES. I wanted to ask, in view of the fact that you have just testified that you will not be able to do 20,000 books that were originally scheduled, how many books are scheduled, were scheduled originally for saving?

Mr. FARR. We have a goal of microfilming three million of the most important brittle books over a 20 year period. To this date, when current projects that have now been funded are completed, we will have filmed approximately 770,000 of that 3 million figure. We are losing ground in the original estimates of what we could do in the 20 year period, but we're moving forward. I do not think that the amount that we have filmed with congressional help thus far has been inconsiderable. I think it's fair to say that no other country in the world has ever undertaken an effort of quite this magnitude.

Mr. YATES. Are other countries trying to do the same with their books?

Mr. FARR. Not to the extent that we are. I think without-
Mr. YATES. Are any trying to do it to any extent?

Mr. FARR. Yes. There are countries, particularly in Western Europe.

Mr. YATES. I mean is England doing it, for example? Which to my mind goes back into the early part of history. If we lose materials that are source materials there, I think it would be a great harm to our civilization.

Mr. FARR. There are current programs in the British Library, and in the libraries at Oxford and Cambridge, that are working to preserve the resources that are held in the British Isles.

Without answering at too great length, every country arranges and holds its cultural resources in a different way. So very often the look of preservation efforts, say in Western Europe, differs because the preponderance of a country's cultural holdings is centered in a single, perhaps great national library.

Mr. YATES. Those libraries are governmentally supported?

Mr. FARR. Yes, governmentally supported. On the other hand, the United States is characterized by a pluralistic system of holdings, and perhaps appropriately so, by the fact that it also is the source of a very important collection for American history and culture. And so the challenge for the United States has been to create a coordinated national program involving many, many institutions. And for that, we do, we like to think-and you have thought so in the past-need national coordination, so that money is not spent

Mr. YATES. I haven't thought so only in the past; I think that way in the present as well. [Laughter.]

Mr. FARR. I just meant to hark back to the beginning of these programs which, after all, are quite new.

Mr. YATES. That's right.

COMPETITIVE SELECTION OF PRESERVATION PROPOSALS

Now you responded, with respect to books, that you're going to not be able to preserve 20,000 books out of the 3 million and you're going to lose some of the 3 million books by the time you get to them. What about papers that Mr. Skaggs was asking about? What about historical papers; are you going to lose some of those as well? Mr. FARR. Yes, because we also support the preservation of special collections and archivable materials of various sorts

Mr. YATES. Well, give us an example of what you fear-
Mr. FARR. Of what will be lost?

Mr. YATES. Of what you fear will be lost. Or, presumably, as I envision what you're doing, you have a list of things that you want to do.

Mr. FARR. No, we do not do that.

Mr. YATES. What do you do?

Mr. FARR. Essentially, what we do is allow institutions to come to us of varying size and types-libraries, archives, museums, historical societies-and they identify a collection, say, that they believe is of national significance. They describe how it is at risk; they describe what needs to be done to catalog it and make it available for users. These proposals are then sent to panels and specialist reviewers. They are evaluated in a competitive fashion.

Mr. YATES. I see.

Mr. FARR. At the end of that cycle, we grant monies to those projects that are deemed most worthy. There has never been an effort and I think it would be impossible to do so, even to achieve agreement on what would be a finite number of the most important collections and the most important institutions. What we have done, essentially, then, is to encourage such applications and then have the most responsible and knowledgeable people identify what is most important to