Austin, Texas
May 18-20, 1994
Gloria Werner, Convener
University of California-Los Angeles
I trust you will agree with me that the first program session did a marvelous job of helping us focus on how multimedia can transform both teaching and learning. In this morning's session, our emphasis shifts from pedagogy to scholarship and research, and we begin to explore the notion of how the library will change the day after tomorrow, what will be possible, for whom, and how soon. Three distinguished people are here today to give us their sense of that day after tomorrow, how things will look and seem and feel, what issues we will be facing, and what criteria we will use to judge our successes and, hopefully not too many, failures.
I would like to introduce you to our three speakers. Our first speaker is Catherine C. Marshall who will show us a video that relates to her work in navigating large complex digital libraries. Cathy is a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC. She is currently in the Collaborative Systems Area of the Information Sciences and Technologies Laboratory, and has been Principal Investigator on a series of projects involving analytic work practices and collaborative hypermedia. Cathy is also Vice Chair of SIGLINK, the ACM's special interest group for hypermedia, and is on the editorial board of Hypermedia Journal. She is currently involved with the program organization of the ACM's hypertext conference series and the upcoming workshop on digital libraries to be held at Texas A&M University in June. Cathy received her bachelor's degree in literature from the California Institute of Technology, and went on to receive her master's degree from the same institution.
Our second speaker, Richard Lanham, will discuss one of the most pressing concerns for scholars and for all of us: time and attention. With infinite amounts of information in the infinite library, what is it that becomes most critical for the creative academic? How can librarians help to maximize the creativity of their scholars or the scholars that are in their situations?
Dick Lanham was educated at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, and at Yale University, from which he holds B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees. He began his teaching career at Dartmouth and since 1965 has taught in the Department of English at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has been a Senior National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, a Senior Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He is the author of The Motives of Eloquence, Literacy, and the Survival of Humanism and eight other books of literary criticism and rhetoric. His latest book, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, was published in late 1993. I highly recommend The Electronic Word to you for an expansion on the themes that Dick will be touching on here today.
Our third speaker is James O'Donnell. From the vantage point of the historian of antique times, Jim will argue that our progress in scholarly communications and the changes in libraries take place over along time. We have always had a view of "the virtual library," and today's vision of it had its seeds 100 years or more ago. We realize the "library of today" was yesterday's "library of tomorrow."
Jim O'Donnell is Professor of Classical Studies and Coordinator of the Center for Computer Analysis of Text at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also special advisor to the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Penn in the areas of electronic technologies. His scholarly work concentrates on the cultural history of the late antique Mediterranean world, and he has published several works in that field. Jim is the founding electronic editor of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review and its younger sibling, the Bryn Mawr Medieval Review. He is engaged in a variety of other publishing and teaching activities in networked communications. This spring, for example, he taught an introductory graduate seminar on the work and thought of Augustine of Hippo to ten students at the University of Pennsylvania and almost 400 additional "auditors," from Hong Kong to Istanbul, via the Internet.