April 3, 2000
Columbia in Web Venture to Share Learning for Profit
By KAREN W. ARENSON
olumbia University and several
other of the world's most prestigious
academic centers are planning to
capitalize on their wealth of scholarly talent and stores of knowledge
by offering them on the Internet, for
a price.
The university is to announce today the formation of a for-profit online partnership with the New York
Public Library, the British Library,
the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, the
London School of Economics and Political Science and Cambridge University Press.
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A new way to mine the potential of intellectual property.
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The goal of the company, Fathom.com, will be to provide knowledge in
its broadest form -- classes taught
by prominent academics like the historian Simon Schama, reference
books like the Cambridge Dictionary
of Philosophy, interviews from Columbia's oral history archive with
people like Dorothy Parker and
Frank Lloyd Wright, and documents
like Magna Carta.
Columbia has been one of the most
aggressive universities in mining the
commercial potential of its intellectual property through patents and
royalties, which bring it more than
$100 million a year. Its new plan will
try to harvest a similar type of bounty through new-media technologies.
Many offerings will be available
free, while others will be sold. The
company also expects to have advertisers and sponsors.
At a time when big-name professors are beginning to strike deals
with independent Internet companies, George E. Rupp, Columbia's
president, describes the creation of
Fathom.com as both an offensive
and defensive move, one that creates
an avenue for its professors to reach
audiences beyond their Morningside
Heights classrooms.
"We want to make sure that our
core intellectual capital is not picked
off by outside for-profit vendors,"
Dr. Rupp said. "But for that, we have
to be able to say to our faculty that
we will devise ways they can communicate with a wider audience,
which many of them would like."
Dr. Rupp said there were already
"tight constraints in the way Columbia faculty can use the Columbia
name and work with outside entities." But the university will not bar
professors from working with other
companies once Fathom is operating. Professors will not be required
to contribute to Fathom, but they will
be paid if they do.
A professor, who spoke only on the
condition of anonymity, called Fathom "a great experiment." But, he
said, while "Columbia has thought
more about intellectual property
than most other universities, there
are still huge holes."
"It worries me a lot that universities think about the Internet as a way
to increase productivity of teaching," he said.
Columbia has given Fathom a five-year license and will hold part ownership of the new venture, which will
have its own board of directors and
which could someday sell shares to
the public. The university will also
continue separately to develop its
ability to offer classes over the Internet to its own students.
Many other universities and companies have already crowded into the
arena of Internet education. But Internet experts say the new Columbia
venture differs from other online
education projects in that it offers a
range of materials, rather than just
individual courses or degree programs.
"The idea of bringing together universities, libraries and museums --
the cultural repositories of the world
-- and making them available
through the Internet is important,"
said Gene DeRose, chairman of Jupiter Communications, an Internet research company based in New York.
"I have not seen anything like it."
Although the partners have their
own Internet sites, several said they
were drawn to Fathom because it
offered access to a wider audience
and help in putting more of what they
have online.
Robert Sullivan, associate director
of public programs at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum, said
Fathom was giving the museum
"tremendous production capacity,"
enabling it to put material online
more quickly. He said that other
Smithsonian institutions may eventually join Fathom, too.
Both Mr. Sullivan and Michael Zavelle, a senior vice president at the
New York Public Library, said there
would be no charge for most of what
they post through Fathom or on their
own Web sites.
The company also plans to add
partners and to market courses from
colleges and universities that are not
partners. Michael M. Crow, executive vice provost at Columbia, said
there are about 70,000 courses available on the Web now, and said he
hoped that about 10,000 courses from
many universities might eventually
be available through Fathom.
Fathom will spend tens of millions
of dollars developing its site, he said,
and at least part of it should be
operating sometime this summer.
The partners hope that a key attraction will be their own reputations
and credibility and what they called
the site's "authenticated knowledge." Like a university, the Web
site will have its own academic council, comprising senior faculty, curators and other officials from the participating institutions and headed by
Columbia's provost, Jonathan R.
Cole.
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"They are the insurance that as
these great institutions put their intellectual capital in our hands, we'll
do right by them," said Ann
Kirschner, the president and chief
executive of Fathom and its primary
architect.
Some faculty members are applauding the new venture. Professor
Schama, the Columbia historian,
said it was important that institutions like Columbia and its partners
be on the Internet.
"Learning is on the verge of a
revolution," he said. "I'm concerned
that not just the marketplace determines what goes online, but that institutions like Columbia and the British Library play a creative part in
shaping what goes on the Internet. It
really oughtn't just be left to the first
person who decides to put a course
up on the Internet."
He said that he was too busy now
to contribute to Fathom, since he is
working on a 16-part series on the
history of Britain for the BBC (which
will also be made available through
BBC online). "But," he added, "one
day, I'd love to."
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