University receives $1.9 million for arts and culture electronic archive

The University received a $1.9 million grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts to create the nation's first electronic data archive on arts and culture. The archive will include statistical data and information that was previously difficult to access and will be available both to researchers and the general public.

Princeton's Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies will work with Firestone library to implement the project.

Founded by Wilson School professor Stanley Katz and sociology professor Paul DiMaggio, the center examines the nation's cultural experience to provide different options for policy decisions.

"We are very committed to trying to identify good sources of data, so research can be done on arts policy," Katz said. "What the grant is for is to mount those sets of data on a Website so they will be available to researchers and the general public."

The data archive is critical for the center's goal — to ensure there is reliable data on the arts to lead to better informed policy decisions.

"We will, for the first time, bring together as much data and existing research as possible," DiMaggio said. "From that, more thoughtful policy can be developed on all levels."

The archive will be accessible to social scientists, members of the general public, such as arts managers, undergraduate students and journalists interested in the nation's cultural trends.

"It's going to be an archive that is versatile enough so that a layman and a practitioner can find useful information, but a scholar that wants to do a very detailed analysis can also get the data they need," associate director of the center Steven Tepper said.

The archive will include information about non-profit and cultural organizations, census data on artist labor markets, survey data on arts participation and public opinion polls, according to Katz.

The project will be "a collaborative effort between our center and the library," he said.

The center will determine which data sets to include in the archive, while the library will handle the technical side.

"The center was created because we felt that in comparison to other policy fields, like education, science, health and the environment, the arguments that are marshaled in defense of the arts are often sort of impassioned pleas that aren't based on a lot of hard evidence," Tepper explained.

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Ann Gray, data services reference librarian in Firestone's Social Science Reference Center, will be leading the project for the library.

"Here at the library, we will be bringing the data in, and preparing the information about the data so that anyone can use it," Gray said.

"This is really an opportune time for us to step in and do something, because there is a danger of some of [the data] being lost," she added.

The creation of the data archive is an important part of the Pew trusts' national culture program, "Optimizing America's Cultural Resources." The goal of the five-year initiative is to strengthen political and financial support for nonprofit culture.

"Policy is only as good as the information and research that underlies it," said Stephen Urice, the program officer in charge of the national culture initiative.

The grant awarded by the Pew trusts is for three years. The University hopes to be able to fund the program in the long term. Katz said he expects the first version of the archive to be up and running within a year.

"It certainly won't be comprehensive, but it will give you a sense of how it works. And then we'll just be adding to it as quickly as we can," Tepper said.

"It's hard to predict exactly what the shape of the archive will look like in five years," he added. "We're always going to be out there shaking trees and trying to see what data fall."