>> Policy Statements Core Values We believe that the pursuit and study of the arts and humanities is vital to the health of society at large. The arts reveal the cognitive power of the creative imagination and its ability to articulate essential truths about the human condition. The humanities, working to preserve and interpret the human record, demonstrate how critical thinking about the past, coupled with ethical and moral evaluation, can reveal the complex nature of the human experience. We believe that a networked cultural heritage is a decided public good, one that should become a vital part of the digital infrastructure. We are excited by the intellectual and social potential of digital networking technology. We advocate a system by which people in all walks of life gain meaningful access to the text, objects, sounds and sights that form our global cultural heritage. By networking the materials held in thousands of collections, we could unlock the expressive power of cultural objects and their creators in a much richer and more rewarding way than ever imagined. We believe in encouraging and enabling the creators, owners, stewards, researchers, teachers, students and perusers of global cultural heritage to work together, sharing their ideas, resources, experience and research. By doing so we will advance the goal of an integrated, distributed body of cultural material accessible to all. November 1998