From Shared Horizons to Impactful Collaboration and Engagement: The Interagency Partnership of the National Endowment for the Humanities/National Library of Medicine, 2012-2024.

Abstract

In 2012, leaders in the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) established an interagency partnership to collaborate on research, education, and career initiatives located at the intersection of biomedical and humanities research. Shortly thereafter, the agencies joined with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and Research Councils UK (now known as UK Research and Innovation) to convene the symposium Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine, and the Digital Humanities. Researchers Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel praised the symposium for "betray[ing] an astonishing optimism: the idea that historians and philosophers and artists and doctors and biologists, thinking about data together, can advance their individual causes better than any of them can alone." Aiden and Michael continued "The conference title…was dead-on. At the interface of all our work lies the most exciting terrain in our intellectual future" (206-7). Ten years on, the NEH-NLM interagency partnership has catalyzed and facilitated joint leadership yielding multiple collaborations, engagements, public programs, and open access publications involving dozens of individuals and touching thousands more. At every turn these initiatives have advanced the complementary missions of the NEH and the NLM, including their commitment to open access publishing, as defined by UNESCO to be "the provision of free access to peer reviewed, scholarly and research information to all,… requir[ing] that the rights holder grants worldwide irrevocable right of access to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and make derivative works in any format for any lawful activities with proper attribution to the original author." This article takes stock of the NEH-NLM interagency partnership, conveying its impact on and relevance to the public service of both agencies. As discussed, the NEH-NLM partnership advances a "whole of society approach" toward improving individual and public health writ large: not only in terms of connecting lab, clinic, and community, but also more broadly in terms of supporting the dissemination of trusted health information and sharing knowledge about the human condition across time and place and as studied by a variety of disciplines ranging from the sciences to the social sciences to the humanities. The partnership also advances a "whole of government" approach toward making government more efficient, transparent, accessible, and impactful through outcomes that are not possible when working in isolation. Examining a decade-plus history demonstrating leadership, management, and mutual support among public sector colleagues, this article points to fundamental lessons learned to help achieve "whole of government" activities in other contexts for the greater good.