Boston, Massachusetts
May 17-19, 1995
John Gage, Director, Science Office
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Dr. Gage began his speech with the computer-age concept of no locational barriers, noting that we are therefore unified by this unbarred access to “thousands of libraries linked by a simple phone line.” Dr. Gage continued by explaining how this has impacted publishing by 1) creating a worldwide audience, 2) creating online texts, and 3) providing rapid and extensive coverage. For the last item he gave two examples. The first was the fact that documents from a conference held the previous day were already available on the Internet. The second example was of a mathematics conference; not only were the proceedings available prior to the conference, in order to facilitate more advanced discussions, but the results of this conference were openly available on the Internet.
This introduction led Dr. Gage to the conclusion that, “With the arrival of massive electronic preprint, with the arrival of easy reference by referees to the articles they are currently working on, what we know as a journal doesn’t exist three years from now.” Therefore, the purpose of his discussion was to “illustrate a few alterations that are technical, and a few alterations that are political that change our lives as professionals. . . , and also what is altering in the world that we should be paying attention to.”
Dr. Gage’s first example of a technical advance was the changing nature of newspaper articles. Bringing out a Wall Street Journal, he pointed out its dead text, where each person’s reading is influenced only by his or her own “newspaper style of annotation developed by experience and gossip and knowledge.” He then contrasted this with the on-line version of the article, which contains its own annotations as part of the text, creating links within the work. This, then, will necessarily effect our notion of a library, as such a reading is termed a “performance. I’m performing here; I’m hitting something, touching it, and links go out. Those links are the document, and the links, of course, are worldwide, so there’s no site anymore for the document.”
Taking this notion one step further, Dr. Gage then explained the continuing trend towards technical convergence, which, when “these things converge, not only will the objects we call televisions or telephones or fax machines all become essentially the same; there will be a new kind of intellectual technology.” Such “technology” includes not only our awareness of the fluidity of executable writings, such as Fortran, which have time dimension and are not limited by location, but also the way we perceive holdings. Without being confined to a single repository, holdings are boundlessly growing, surpassing what we could before only imagine. All of which leads us to greater capabilities.
However, with such capabilities, Dr. Gage points out that there are concerns regarding security and authenticity. To highlight those concerns, Dr. Gage spoke on encryption and regulatory advances. On the up side, though, Dr. Gage was quick to point out the fact that our rapid computer growth will bring with it rapid technological advances, while at the same time creating lower prices both for services and hardware.
To familiarize themselves with the changing environment, Dr. Gage recommended that the audience browse with their computers and “watch the formation of new taxonomic forms... and notice how, as we start adding different forms and catalogs, and as we start making these things blend and merge and point to each other, there will emerge new intellectual categories, and new cataloging categories to help find things.” Dr. Gage’s second suggestion to spend time with new technology is done with the following in mind, that “the hard part in all of this is not the technology, it’s administering things.”
It is that thought which led Dr. Gage to his conclusion, that, perhaps more so than the technical changes, the future promises to create new cultural environments. Giving the example of one’s familiarity with a library or bookshelf, Dr. Gage declares that this current spatial memory will change as we begin to execute all of our documents locally. Furthermore, our current intuitive senses will expand to include our searching techniques. Just as our senses now perk up when a dropped object doesn’t fall, “all those old tricks now start being used for linking human minds into this web of interconnected objects.”
Finally, it is “books or libraries as performance. The process of access to information is the important part. The location of it is not.” Dr. Gage asks, “And who are the people who are going to do this? You are, because where else are the repositories, and, more importantly, where else are the people to make sense of them? This is a serious challenge, and that is what the next few days are dedicated to.”