Austin, Texas
May 18-20, 1994
Dan Atkins
University of Michigan
I am delighted to have this opportunity to speak today, but I am also frustrated because I would like to spend the whole day talking with you about these issues. I would also like to get extensive feedback and reaction to what we think we are doing. The best I can do now is to give you a table of contents of some things we have underway, to suggest some things that you can think about, and to invite you to find ways to interact with us as we try to implement the future I am going to attempt to articulate.
I am also extremely excited by the resonance between the idea I will relate to you in the next few minutes, and the visions and comments of the previous speakers. I will leave it to you to decide what the signal-to-noise ratio of my talk is, but I will increase the bit rate to try to get through a lot of material.
At the University of Michigan we have been building an extensive home page describing the activities, the catalog project, and the collaboratory projects. The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is http://http2.sils.umich.edu/. A second URL--http://http2.sils.umich.edu/UARC/HomePage.html--is a specific presentation in the Web, available through Mosaic clients, concerning the collaboratory projects I'll talk a little bit about.
"What is the library of the future?" We have heard a lot of interesting views about it. Are we exploring enough of the options in the vision space of the future and are ARL libraries exploring it? I have read that many of you have a view of what this vision is. I believe you have aspirations to be relevant in this vision, but not enough ARL libraries are positioning themselves to help create, invent, and proactively shape this future. There tends to be much observing of what is happening from afar, with the expectation perhaps that something is going to be handed over the wall or you will be able to buy it from your friendly OPAC vendor. That is not going to happen.
First of all, we are not talking about a coined product. We are talking about a deep meeting of technology and the process of scholarly communication is done. We are really talking about the future of the university. If you define the vision of a university to be the creation, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge. If you recognize that the academic library has traditionally been at the heart of that vision, frequently at the geographical center of that campus. Then the issues that were talked about earlier indicating this future mean that we are going to have to change dramatically our way you accomplish that vision. Ironically, if we do not, we are not going to be able to achieve that vision.
I would like to talk, then, about what we are doing about educating the ILS professionals to lead in creating and managing this new environment. I would like to get opinions and a few comments about the AAU Research Libraries Task Force Reports. I know that they will be discussed later; I strongly encourage you to read those reports. A lot of good people put a lot of time into them, and in my opinion they are an excellent medium in terms of suggested plans of actions. It is my understanding that the AAU presidents are quite enthusiastic about those recommendations, and I would suggest to you that it offers an enormous opportunity to you to provide leadership in federation, both within the campus and more importantly within federations between various libraries.
Let me speak first as a computer scientist. The developments over the past 20 years in high-performance computing and high-performance ubiquitous computing have been incredible. It is continuing to be incredible, but it is the most predictable aspect of the future. It is clear that Intel and the PowerPC people--Apple--are going to double the performance you can buy for current price in the foreseeable future. No question about it.
It is also a fact that two years ago the price performance of communication technology went up ten times faster than the price performance change of computing. Incredible. In that time, we were also actually getting pretty good at building software and systems technology that links all this stuff together, that securely relaxes some constraints of distance and time on this computering environment and ubiquitous computering. Ubiquitous computering for today means not simply computing where, it means computing everywhere and nowhere. It means that computing is literally being pushed into the future. It means that in the same way that small electric motors have revolutionized the way vehicles are built, but we do not think of it as an instance of motor technology.
So the time has come to focus on the true value-added--the higher level of abstract activities that are made possible by this substratum, by this platform, by this distributed computing. As we think about what we really want to do with this raw technology, what value-added do we want to distribute? How do we want to make it part of a strategic opportunity and not an enormous problem? That is really what is distinguishing for corporate America and all that this implies as to whether it continues to be an enormous problem, or whether they view it to be an enormous opportunity.
I would argue that on top of this substructure ubiquitous system we have three things, three human centers to communicate with the libraries and with each other. We want access to the vast array of information resources that we need to inform human work, to disseminate human work, and, increasingly, to capture the process and rationale that goes into the creation of those artifacts We also want remote interaction with the physical world. We want to use this technology to enhance creativity. We want to relax constraints of distance and time dramatically. When I say distance, I mean geographical as well as organizational distance.
In order to do that, as has been stated by several of the users, there are many changes that need to be made. One, we need to enhance the nature of the interface between humans and this environment. It is also very clear to me, as well as to the National Science Foundation and others, that the only way we are going to gain a truly human-centered perspective on what to do with all this technology is by engaging in some carefully selected and instrumented studies and evaluated pilot projects. If you carry nothing away from today except the following, I would be pleased, and that is that the organizations you lead need to take the leadership in bringing together the appropriate disciplines and the resources to conduct these meaningful pilot projects.
Finally, I believe more and more of us are beginning to realize that this technology is not just a nice add-on. It is not something simply to format a paper. It is not even something that allows us to simply better send a facsimile of a piece of paper to someone else. It is really starting to cause us to address the fundamental nature of our institutions and the way we do things. I strongly agree that publishers, libraries, and institutions are at risk but are also available for an incredible renewal. We are really talking about the need to develop a much clearer understanding of information technology and social systems, how and when we create them, in a simultaneous interactive way.
Now, the future is all around us. If we want to be slightly demanding about it, it is "digital library," not "electronic library," because what we are really talking about is the digital nature of the representation of information that gives us coherent property, that allows integration of all types of media. The digital representation can then be encoded electronically, optically, or magnetically. The key point here is that we are talking about the representation and the use of information in digital forms. We are talking about the ability to move information at the speed of light. We are talking about the ability to store information. It is no wonder that this provides the basic raw ingredients for radical transformation of how knowledge does work. It is not that surprising. This digital transformation is in the sense--if you stop and think about it, you can convince yourself--that the vast majority (it has been estimated at 99 percent) of all new information that is being created is being formed in digital formats. Most anything that appears on paper is created in a word processor or page layout package, all the recording is quickly moving there. The high end is digital, and the home market will soon be digital--earlier today I was using a camera that creates a digital image right in the camera. The digital encoding of information is, of course, already around us.
As we explore the social and technical forces on our various fields and institutions, we need to be careful that we are not only going down an extrapolating path, taking card catalogs and automating them, enriching those with surrogates, and speeding up the library--all of that sounds like a very good way to proceed--but that we are also considering fundamental new ways to accomplish our fundamental vision, to explore this entire vision space, looking not just at OPACs, email, Gopher, Mosaic, or World Wide Web. Digital libraries encompass the concept of electronic communities over public libraries, the seamless library, the concept of collaboratories, knowledge dissemination, and social work.
This term "collaboratory" was coined by Bill Wolf at the National Science Foundation a few years ago. It is a name for a future of information that allows humans--and particularly humans--to communicate, to collaborate, and to have the full array of information resources, as well as the means of dissemination and the knowledge they need to interact with the physical, all made even richer by a rich technology. There has been a lot published of late on that. There is the National Academy of Science report on the collaboratory focus in the sciences and engineering. I would present it to you as a generic concept that can support business, independent learning, electronic commerce, and information. It is, in my opinion, a name for my concept of what the next paradigm of computing communication will become. It will ultimately be at the heart of how we organize and conduct work within universities.
We have to give a lot of attention to how we are going to create the user-centered environments of the future. They have to be entirely and extremely collaborative. I am using the metaphor of something called a Verona ring. It has a property that nothing intersects anything, but that if you remove any of it, it destroys the synergy. A very nice icon. In this case we need the technology. The paid specialist can evaluate the values within a user community and work hand-in-hand internally to discover and move forward in creating these systems. Technology is not doing something in isolation. Giving it to the user will not work in this new world.
Now let us turn to the question of what this means for Information Library Science education. I would suggest that the possible evolution of digital libraries is going to be a blurring of distinction between types of libraries, hopefully increasing this federation of information. It is my hope that public and school libraries will converge into what might become community education and collaboration systems, that special libraries will merge into business and industrial collaboration systems, increasingly supporting forms of electronic commerce, and that academic research libraries will become the information collaboration systems and continue to be at the fore of scholarly information and of the university.
Now as we look at the field, it is very important to think hard about what our fundamental business is, particularly with any field or institution under threat. Our conclusion is that a part of ILS and part of what should be produced in our ILS schools, is the intersection between access to data, information and knowledge (intellectual, physical, and over the long-term), knowledge of users and use of information, and supporting technology. Of course the profession has used technology for many, many years. What has happened overnight, however, is the type of technology that is being bought has changed dramatically. But we must continue to be true to the commitment to access in all senses, and we need new professionals who can create and manage the resources to do that in this new world. This is precisely what we have been asked to do at Michigan.
The president of the university recently asked us to restructure the degree program to educate the information knowledge professionals for the twenty-first century and to also try to do some unique things to continuing education. The school is used as a hub of a variety of research focusing on the design and understanding of systems, and the school itself is a small laboratory. We are looking at every aspect: the faculty, the facilities, the research and services, and the nature of the students and their employment opportunities. We need the help of the academic library leadership in defining the kinds of products that you need for the future--inventory, values, access, user services, and so forth. We were very fortunate to obtain a large grant from the Kellogg Foundation, $4.3 million, that will enable us to establish cooperation with other ILS schools to modify the learning environment, to produce the leaders for the digital information world. We are going to develop pilot projects to certify hands-on learning, create specifications, support continuing education, and apply collaboratory ideas to the actual delivery of a program of business in individual formats. We are just beginning, so there is a lot of room for you to be involved in shaping it.
The NSF proposal to the library community, and several evaluation projects were received. I am not going over the details of the Michigan proposal except to point out that the kind of coalition you need to bring together to address this future effectively is a combination of research, information, library science, and economic knowledge properties. You need actual employment of science in order to try this out. You need intrinsic evaluation, participation of experimental systems, builders of information, resource providers, and of course technology providers. I was very pleased with the recent report in The Chronicle of Higher Education about some of the things that we are doing.
The final thing I want to say about the AAU reports, is that there are a lot of things easy to say but hard to do--restructure, reengineer, working together, build distributing systems, and trade-off collection. There is overwhelming conviction across the task forces, which had very little detailed interaction, and enormous similarity in the outcomes of those reports. The strongly held conviction of a broad spectrum of professors, administrators, and other people is that there are enormous opportunities and a real call for leadership on behalf of the ARL libraries. I look forward to working with you as we move toward a closer realization of digital libraries.