Jan 06, 2023

Rich Fagen and Networks: from Big Science to High Culture

Rich Fagen, until very recently the Chief Digital Officer at the J. Paul Getty Trust or the Getty, was among the creative founders who helped form CENIC in the 1990s. Now on the occasion of his retirement, his career can be regarded as the perfect reflection of the way high-performance networking – initially created to support data-driven big science – has become just as vital for data-driven arts and culture.

Fagen was at Caltech in the mid-1990s when he was approached by Stuart Lynn, then working in the University of California Office of the President. “He was trying to figure out how to support network connections among the UC campuses and thought it would be good to get the state’s private universities involved,” recalled Fagen. He noted that when he began at Caltech, the campus was using BITNET as its network, and he had to advise faculty and staff to send large files late at night to avoid clogging the network during the day. By the time the campus moved to CENIC, its capacity was a game-changer for high-end network users in the faculty – but not only its capacity. “We always had innovators like Harvey Newman on the edge of network performance,” said Fagen, “and CENIC was always very accommodating to him and his lab. That is the difference between CENIC and just a commercial enterprise: CENIC’s willingness to work with high-end users to come up with customized high-end solutions.”

However, after nearly sixteen years with Caltech supporting the needs of network scientists and users of big data in analytics, Fagen was recruited to support a totally different type of .edu institution when he joined the Getty leadership.

“What I was able to bring to the Getty was the people network of connections I had built by working with expertise found at CENIC, Internet2, and EDUCAUSE,” said Fagen, who noted that his networking team moved from focusing on the network as a commodity to recognizing its power to create a global scope for the invaluable Getty collections. “Our networking team started going to CENIC events and meetings which broadened their understanding and allowed them to contribute to the dialogue about what was possible with our archives.”

Fagen noted that in many ways, the Getty is a memory institution, conserving great works in a physical sense to ensure that materials don’t deteriorate. Beyond that, digitally-empowered arts and cultural institutions can engage in digital art conservancy – making items, images, and materials available to the public around the world that were never available before and further ensuring that these assets don’t deteriorate.

“I’m often asked when we will have everything at the Getty digitized, and my answer is never,” said Fagen. “The rate at which we are acquiring new assets far outstrips our ability to digitize those assets. We could spend years digitizing someone’s archive, but in the meantime, we have acquired three more archives.”

Among the more exciting archives Fagen was involved with as he was leaving the Getty is that of the Johnson Publishing Company, publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, in addition to other periodicals, radio programs, and a television variety show. Getty shares the responsibility of stewarding the collections along with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).

“Just imagine – there are four to five million photos in their archives, negatives, some videos – and most of it has not been digitized at all,” said Fagen. “This collection traces African American history of the 20th Century, and it’s going to be a great research tool as well as an amazing database freely available to the public in the next few years.”

Fagen then addressed the vital work involved in creating metadata around all of these materials. For example, a photo in the collection may have a photographer’s stamp on the back, but crucial questions remain. What does this photo represent? Who is pictured here and where, when, and why was it taken? In order to enable other institutions and members of the public to interact meaningfully with the assets, the materials’ metadata must anticipate and support all of the ways in which people may use them and make these interactions as seamless as possible. Digitization also makes it much easier to share collections with other institutions like the Smithsonian, along with systemized mass digitization efforts to move through collections faster.

“Once those millions of photos are digitized and their metadata defined, imagine how we can interact with the data, finding street scenes or fashion over time, or notable people even. Once we put these big data sets out there, people will come up with very innovative ways to use them that no one can imagine now.”

In reflecting on the arc of his networking career, Fagen noted how much expectations had changed. “When I began in networking, we used to be so amazed that we could send a file to Europe. And now, we expect any file in the world to be instantaneously available.” Fagen’s own career arc – starting with Caltech to his retirement from the Getty – highlights another critical way in which expectations have changed. High-performance networks are no longer only the data backbone of global science but have become an equally invaluable backbone for those who study and preserve the human artistic and cultural experience as well.

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