Eugene, Oregon
May 13-15, 1998

The Future Network: Transforming Learning and Scholarship

Program Session I:

Advanced Network Development Strategies

Question and Answer Session

MR. NEAL: I'm reminded that, though it may be the early bird that gets the worm, it is often a second mouse that gets the cheese. And, I think it's as Mark Luker indicated, the second mouse is often the private sector.

Mark and Doug Van Houweling have provided us with a clear and energetic invitation for the involvement of the research library community perhaps as the second mouse in future Internet development with the particular focus on policy, access, organization, archiving, and applications issues.

They are very interested in your comments and your questions.

MS. VON WAHLDE (University of Buffalo): We still work with a lot of old technology in our libraries, and we have responsibilities as custodians for very large print collections. While we're cognizant of that responsibility, it also is a drawback in our thinking about new ways to move forward and how the future might look because we have one foot in the past at the same time as we are trying to put one forward.

Could you give me some ideas, based on your technology vision, about what you think might be breakthroughs or new services for libraries, or how we could open up our own imagination to that?

DR. VAN HOUWELING: I think the most exciting new applications are in two general arenas. The first is the group use of scholarly materials, whether synchronously or asynchronously. The notion that you would connect the author of the article to the readers, that the readers could be engaged in communities to discuss journal articles and other things that are available, actually creating global intellectual communities around particular publications, is a very exciting concept. And the fact that this new environment will allow people to actually sit and talk with one another, to engage in real chat rooms as opposed to typing in chat rooms about publications, and that it will record that interaction, opens up a whole new arena of scholarly interaction.

Another exciting opportunity, I believe, has to do with knowledge that isn't well represented on paper. Increasingly, our knowledge about neurosciences--I use that as one example, but there are enormous varieties--is captured much better in graphic, visual, and simulation forms. And with the articles that refer to that knowledge, the sort of footnote computer programs and other things, you really can't understand it unless you can see what's not on the printed page. It seems to me that publications like that provide special opportunities for us to expand the way human beings get at and process information.

MS. BAKER (Washington University in St. Louis): I'm always as interested in the human and organizational issues as I am in the technological issues. My question is sparked by a recent meeting on my campus with the computer science and engineering departments and the leadership of the visual arts and the design center.

On my campus there has been some really good research done on big pipes transmitting a lot of information, driven both by engineering interests and by medical interests. One of the challenges we face is, beyond medicine, what to do. My engineering colleagues see that some of the next big applications might involve art, architecture, music, or libraries.

But then we run into some cultural issues. Those disciplines--at least their serious aspects--are not used to thinking in terms of big bucks. So we lack the imagination to think of what we would do if great amounts of money flowed down on us, the kind of money that you need in order to do something worthy of Internet2. And the funding agencies are not used to thinking about us as worthy of great amounts of money. So we have some real cultural problems. How do we address this?

DR. LUKER: I would like to push back a little on the great amounts of money statement. We are at the stage right now where you do need great amounts of money to get the big pipe to your campus or you need someone to fund that for you. That will not last very long. Internet1 has been growing by leaps and bounds, not just in numbers but in capacity and quality. I believe this will all be quite affordable.

Where will the money come from? It will not come from above, like a state legislature or something. I think it will come from the combination of the voice telephone network, our video services, all the things we are doing now independently and separately to accomplish what we could be doing together in this new format. The commercial industry is leading that. So we will follow entertainment and some others in building the big pipe, but I don't think it will cost a lot. All the predictions are just the opposite; there will be a decrease in cost.

I think that goes to the applications as well. Truly good multimedia computers have hit the $1,000 mark now. That's ten times less than recently; it's because of standardization. I think we'll be able to build it into our ordinary budgets.

Now, within the universities how does an art department, for instance, get it? This is another matter, and I think we have a real crunch coming in higher education to reallocate funding away from the research dollars, which have supported the fancy computers in certain departments, into the way we do business, which has to support everyone.

DR. VAN HOUWELING: I would add a couple of thoughts. The first is that I believe it will be critical for us to find ways to partner with the major corporations that are interested in this same space. We have started to have conversations in UCAID with some of these corporations--and you can imagine who they are--about becoming corporate members and partners in the Internet2 efforts.

They are extremely interested in finding a path to the capabilities that exist on our campuses in these areas because they are, frankly, starved for human resources to do their business, and they know it will get worse rather than better. They haven't to date had an organizational alternative that allows them to establish relationships to support that activity on the campus in the way they would like. There are a number of difficulties associated with issues of intellectual property that we'll have to confront as we deal with that. But I think there are real prospects for advancement there.

The second thing I would say goes a little bit with what Mark said. We are now just at the stage where this technology will start to be deployed in support of the liberal arts and the fine arts in a major way. It has a lot to do with cost. It also has a lot to do with the young people who are entering the classrooms, the drafting rooms, the studios, and the practice rooms in our institutions, some of whom have had a direct, comfortable experience with this technology.

When I was at Carnegie-Mellon I was associated with what was called the Star Wars University. It was a period of time when some very technically focused institutions sort of pushed the frontier. It wouldn't surprise me if really high-quality institutions focused on the liberal arts, and the arts find a new frontier to push here. It's an exciting opportunity, both for the library profession and those institutions in the future.

MS. CRIST (University of Massachusetts-Amherst): My question is an extension on the previous question. What we are hearing locally is that I2 is a very project-based approach. Five projects have been selected, and that's the limit of access at least for a while.

So, what's the view nationally? I mean, how should we in libraries be thinking about this? Do we have to--as we have done--basically partner with one of the targeted areas so at least we can come in the back door, the side door, or some door?

There is some concern about this issue, if we are thinking about the broader sense of a learning environment where much of what the library has to offer can be made available. I'm interested in what the thinking is on how this will play out. Are we really talking about our libraries needing to be sure we are partnering with those who will be designated? Or will we see a time that we should be planning for where there is a more general availability of this technology for our campuses?

DR. LUKER: I have a very clear answer from the NSF viewpoint. When your campuses signed up for awards for the vBNS or the Internet2 connections, they all signed a sentence that said they will support the projects immediately and then roll out the support to everyone on campus. The national view is that all this has to work for everyone, and the sooner, the better.

MS. CRIST: So, we need to be pushing that issue on our campuses and pushing the library as part of that more generalized application.

DR. LUKER: I think so. And I can easily imagine how most information will be delivered through networks in the future for most people in the world.

MS. CRIST: That's not what we're hearing yet.

DR. LUKER: No, I'm looking down the road again. As the costs increase and we want to provide access to quality education, how will we do that besides through the network?

DR. VAN HOUWELING: I'd just like to add that I think it's terribly important that the libraries launch some projects themselves. Riding along with investigation-driven projects is very important, and there will be many opportunities to learn from and facilitate those projects. But there are what I call knowledge infrastructure needs that I believe only libraries can really address in the comprehensive way they need to be addressed. The very same way that we in the Internet2 program need to be thinking about quality of service and about authentication and authorization, libraries need to be thinking about organizing this space, about how they can make these new multimedia opportunities available on a broad and yet user authenticated basis. There are issues here that you know better than I do. So I'd love to see proposals from libraries or groups of libraries that are focused on how to move this forward.

MR. KOBULNICKY (University of Connecticut): I want to ask both panelists if they have thought about strategies for encouraging more rapid cultural change on our campuses. One of the concerns I have when we look at either IT or scholarly communication is the realization that we are pushing against a very stable cultural environment. We are still in the process on our campus of dealing with early adopters of Internet1, let alone Internet2.

Have you thought about ways in which we can get directly to the academic community and academic planners and leaders to effect more systematic change?

DR. VAN HOUWELING: Well, yes. But I'm not sure that what I'm going to say will reassure you. This is a subject of some conversation at every one of our board meetings, and you know who's on our board so you can imagine what their focus is. The chancellors and the presidents are deeply concerned about this issue on their campuses.

The reason they are so concerned is that they believe this is a survival issue for the institutions. The students that they will be getting over the next five to ten years will be of this new culture. They already are; their faculty isn't. They believe it's creating an enormous competitive opportunity for new kinds of learning institutions that are prepared to receive those students. They recognize they have the advantage now of the franchise for well-to-do families allowing their kids a place to grow up, but that's not a very broad and lasting franchise. So there's a lot of concern focused on this issue. I wish I had a better idea of how we will find our way through it.

I do believe that, as the generation of scholars who are the students of today become faculty over the next five to ten years, there will be a key change. That that may be the most powerful demographic tool we have in driving this problem.

DR. LUKER: I might add that success in the advanced networking area will bring great opportunities and stimulation of interest in the form of competition. We'll be able to get your information or, in fact, instruction anywhere. So, it will be closer to a market of ideas and information.

Who pays and how much will be part of the issue because that's part of what drives the market. But competition will bring those issues to a much sharper edge than we've seen in the past, which will be good in the long run. In the short run, it will bring tremendous challenges. It's probably not the best for global regional libraries to add terminals alongside the paper collection. We may not want to stand and integrate all of our present collections and procedures if we already have a paper collection. So that means some kind of big, cultural change and difficult decisions in cross-organizations that aren't in any common business unit and don't plan together.

The same thing goes for instruction. We won't get to asynchronous quality learning for everyone by getting more computer labs on all our residential campuses. So I think there's quite a revolution ahead. It's inevitable. It will happen because the access will be there, and others will step into the gap if we don't.

Finally, here's a positive note. One of the colleges where I worked recently, the University of Wisconsin, has some of the best plans for technology over the entire campus. It's the College of Education, not computer science or physics. How did they do it? They closed senior faculty positions when the people retired and dedicated the money to information technology and staff. It can be done. They are in control of their budgets on average.

The same kind of arguing that you can't afford computing and networking is why you don't have enough secretaries or Xerox machines and the carpets are dirty. The common coinage is not the number of faculty positions you have and growth and the numbers; it's quality. Think of quality.

DR. VAN HOUWELING: I would just put a point on that. If, in fact, the worldwide information resource represented by your libraries is captive to institutions that have not thought carefully about how they will adapt to the future we are describing, then I think we are not just threatening individual libraries and individual universities, but the resources for which you collectively have responsibility on a global basis. It's an awesome kind of a challenge and one that I hope we can work together to address.

MR. NEAL: On that note, we thank you.