08 January 2010

This Week from Washington, January 8

Podcast on Clinton’s remarks on development, digital books project

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The United States is elevating development to play a role equal to diplomacy and defense in U.S. foreign policy, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says. In remarks at the Peterson Institute for International Economics January 6th in Washington, Clinton said efforts to end poverty and inequality are crucial to creating a more stable and democratic world. The Obama administration’s emphasis on development is based on “partnership, not patronage,” with the countries it is seeking to help, she said.

“Development built on consultation rather than decree is more likely to engender the local leadership and ownership necessary to turn good ideas into lasting results,” Clinton said. The United States is looking for partners who are demonstrating their own commitment to development by practicing good governance, rooting out corruption, and making their own financial contribution to their own development.

The U.S. approach, in programs such as the Millennium Challenge Corporation, highlights the difference between aid and investment. The United States will continue to provide aid such as food and medicine around the world, but through strategic investment, the United States seeks to break the cycle of dependence that aid can create. The U.S. goal is to help countries build their own institutions and their own capacity to deliver essential services.

The Obama administration sees development as a strategic, economic and moral imperative; one that is as important as diplomacy and defense to advancing American interests and solving global problems. One third of humanity lives in conditions that offer little opportunity. It is difficult to stop terrorism when hundreds of millions of young people “see a future with no jobs, no hope and no way ever to catch up to the developed world,” Clinton said. Many have found themselves “on the wrong side of globalization, cut off from markets and out of reach of modern technologies.” It is difficult to help advance human rights “when hunger and poverty threaten to undermine the good governance and rule of law needed to make those rights real,” the secretary said.

Along with investments in areas such as health, agriculture, security, education, energy and local governance, the United States will also be designing development programs specifically to help women and girls.  Women and girls are “one of the world’s greatest untapped resources,” Clinton said. Studies have shown that the children of a woman who has even one year of education will be less likely to die young or from hunger and are more likely to go to school themselves.

The U.S. Library of Congress, the world’s largest library, has digitally scanned nearly 60,000 rare books as part of its first-ever mass book-digitization project. Many of these books are too old and fragile to be safely handled. But now anyone who wants to learn about the early history of the United States, or track the history of their own families, can read and download these books for free.

The project, called Digitizing American Imprints, gives free access to rare information that covers, among other things, the period of Western settlement of the United States from 1865 to 1922. The oldest work is dated from 1707. Many of the works contain hard-to-find Civil War histories. Others hold county, state and regional information relating to specific people, their occupations and families, and other details that are important for historians. The project offers historians a wealth of information that’s otherwise difficult to locate. The Library of Congress has digitized many of its other collections. More than 7 million photographs, maps, audio and video recordings, newspapers, letters and diaries can be found at the Library’s Digital Collections site.

A $2 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation enabled the book digitization project. One of the grant’s objectives was to address some of the issues that other book digitization projects had mainly avoided, like how to deal with books that are very sensitive to handling. The Library of Congress established some procedures and preservation treatments in order to scan these rare books. The Library is now producing a report on best practices for dealing with sensitive books and fold-out materials, such as maps, that it plans to post on its Web site.

After being scanned, the rare books will be retired to an environmentally controlled storage facility at Fort Meade in Maryland for preservation.

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