Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

Timothy Stephen & Teresa M. Harrison

Dept. of Language, Literature & Communication
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

When Marshall McLuhan once remarked that we look at the future "through the rearview mirror", he meant that tomorrow's technologies are only sensible to the extent that we can see how they can be situated within the framework of today's structures of sensibility. This idea has been very important, if not foundational, in our efforts to build what has become the oldest and most extensive online disciplinary center on the international academic computer networks.

Since the 1980s, there has been a veritable explosion in the adoption of information technologies in academe, especially in the area of networking and computer-mediated communication. Virtually all universities and colleges of any size now provide the campus community with connectivity to Bitnet, Internet, or USENET. The professoriate has also begun to change its work habits. Though only ten years ago there was still a substantial number of faculty and students who were non-adopters, this is less the case today. There are still some who avoid integrating information technology into their academic lives but it is certainly no longer common. The university is increasingly composed of a younger faculty, staff, and student population that finds information technologies integral to their work. The typical faculty member works in an institution that supplies: (1) free e-mail connectivity, (2) access to computer terminals or workstations that can serve as network terminals, and, most importantly, (3) rudimentary support services. This is the computing context that we assumed that most academics enjoyed --- or would soon enjoy --- when in 1985 we began to develop the online disciplinary center for the field of communication studies now known as "Comserve."

Creating an Online Disciplinary Center

Comserve is a disciplinary research and education center --- an online information and discussion service for students and faculty in communication studies and fields related to communication. These include mass communication, journalism, rhetoric, speech, organizational communication, technical communication, interpersonal communication, discourse studies, and some areas of social linguistics. This article will briefly describe the services available through Comserve. It will also discuss what we mean by "community" and the considerations that gave rise to the special design features of Comserve that have facilitated its emergence as an online community of scholars. We'll conclude by mentioning some of the challenges we face after seven years of operating the service.

Technical Overview of Comserve

Comserve is located on a university mainframe system that has direct network connections to both Bitnet and the Internet and indirect links to virtually all other computer networks. Comserve is itself a software package that operates continuously, functioning as a sort of robot entity with an obsessive interest in its mail. It continually watches its electronic mailbox for e-mail and interactive messages that contain commands from individual users. When such a message arrives, Comserve responds immediately by opening the message, locating the command, taking whatever action is indicated by the command, and sending an appropriate response. Users can thus direct Comserve's actions as one might direct the actions of an executive secretary, asking it to retrieve files, to locate information about others, to assemble materials in support of research, and to open channels of communication with other scholars and students. In addition to some less important functions, Comserve supplies five primary services: (1) a extensive set of conferencing services, (2) access to a large library (or "database") of scholarly documents, (3) access to a self-service electronic directory of disciplinary members, (4) access to an electronic index of the major journals of the communication discipline, and (5) production and distribution of a electronic peer-reviewed scholarly journal.

Hotline Conferencing service. The conferencing system consists of 26 computer conferences, called "hotlines", each addressing a topic of research, pedagogical, or professional interest to communication scholars. The communication discipline is naturally partitioned into standard divisions. If one were to walk into a meeting of the Canadian Communication Association, the International Communication Association, or the Australian Communication Association, etc., one would quite likely encounter individuals who have organized in terms of a standard set of interests -- organizational communication, rhetoric, mass communication, gender studies, family interaction, etc. We've reproduced this familiar structure within an integrated set of public electronic conferences available on Comserve. Scholars and students can join and participate in as many of these as they wish. They are used to ask questions and provide answers or to participate in more general discussions of issues relevant to research, teaching, and professional life in the field.

Our public conferences are open to anyone (but generally attract faculty and students whose interests are related to a particular topic area); however, we also provide a suite of private conferences for smaller groups of users who wish to focus on more specialized interests or collaborative projects of fixed temporal duration. For example, one group of scholars has used a private conference to coordinate the production of a book. Another set of private conferences has been used several times to enable cooperative educational experiences in which scholars at universities in different countries coordinate their courses so that students can participate in online discussion with peers taking complementary courses at other educational institutions around the world (exchanging views, having debates, etc.). One private conference is being used currently to plan and execute an elaborate joint research project by a group of scholars from seven countries who have never met face to face.

Comserve's Library of Scholarly Documents. Comserve maintains an online free-access repository or ("database") of several thousand files divided into subject areas: announcements, bibliographies, research tools, newsletters, syllabi, descriptions of graduate curricula. Most of the materials have been contributed spontaneously by members of the discipline. However, we've also actively pursued a program of strategic acquisitions. For example, our Master Scholars program solicits pedagogical materials from disciplinary leaders identified by Comserve's 7,000 member community of users.

Electronic Disciplinary Directory. Comserve's third primary area of service is called "the whitepages." This is a self-service electronic database of information about our users. It includes e-mail addresses, standard postal addresses, phone numbers, and information about scholarly interests.

Index to Scholarly Journals. Comserve's "Journals Index" contains bibliographic information about articles in 37 major communication journals (of these 22 are not indexed by any other commercial vendor). The Journals Index references more than 16,500 articles; it can be searched by title, author, or by journal. At the present time it is the most comprehensive index for the communication discipline's literature in existence (either electronic or in print). Comserve's parent organization, the non-profit Communication Institute for Online Scholarship, markets a personal computer version of this database, named ComIndex, to university libraries and individuals at nominal cost. Proceeds from sales of this software are used to support the free-access Comserve service.

The Electronic Journal of Communication. Most academic professional associations contribute to the generation of new knowledge by sponsoring one or more scholarly journals. Hence, as our user community congealed and matured, it seemed natural for Comserve to host an electronic journal, which it has now done for two and a half years. Comserve's parent organization, the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship, is the electronic publisher for The Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue Electronique de Communication, (EJC/REC) a peer reviewed electronic journal in English with French abstracts (for further information about the history of this journal, see Harrison, Winter, & Stephen, 1991). The CIOS is currently developing personal computer-based display software for use with EJC/REC. This program will allow users to download EJC/REC and the display software directly from Comserve and then use the software to read EJC/REC. The software allows one to take marginal notes, insert bookmarks, search for phrases and words, pop-up bibliographic references and footnotes in place in the text and protects author copyright by making the articles unalterable.

Other Services. In addition to these services, Comserve provides an extensive online help system and the CIOS publishes printed documentation to Comserve (Stephen & Harrison, 1991) as well as print and online newsletters. Bitnet users of VAX or CMS computer systems can also take advantage of a menu-driven interface program named "Easycom" that simplifies communicating with Comserve. Easycom allows users to select Comserve options from plain language menus and then communicates the appropriate command to Comserve. Finally, Comserve has multi-lingual capabilities. At the present time Comserve can respond to users in English or Spanish and the CIOS plans to add new language options in the coming months.

Building Community Electronically

One conclusion from seven years of experience with Comserve is that technology doesn't create community in and of itself. Nor does community emerge spontaneously from network interaction. Merely enabling communication through a single Listserv-type channel doesn't in itself mean that scholars and students will engage in activities that help to advance scientific or educational goals. Meaningful dialogue occurs only when academics and scientists establish self-regulating communities.

In the classic view, participatory democracy is built from the collective action of individuals engaging in interdependent decision making in small, geographically distinct communities. Members of these communities share several characteristics including a common history, an emergent role structure, interdependent decision making, self-determination, and a psychological sense of belonging.

According to observers like Alexis de Tocqueville, American democracy grew out of geographically isolated communities. These communities formed a strong foundation of locally invested citizens. However, following the industrial revolution, rapid urbanization removed geographic isolation as an element promoting community and substituted the mass culture. Our natural community boundaries are now gone and the mass media lulls us into thinking that we are all members of an amorphous social conglomerate, one with which it is difficult to connect and become involved. In result, social critics now worry about how we can rebuild community processes within social life.

Many interested in the juncture of technology and society hope that the new computer communication systems will regenerate the formation of communities, allowing new ones to emerge on the international networks. These communities will be comprised of individuals who are geographically distant but who share investments in disciplinary issues. However, if the software systems that comprise the global networks are to fulfill this potential, these systems must be more carefully tailored to fit the social contexts in which they are employed. The psychological and social design of the services must be given much more attention in the years ahead than they have so far. We can and should be doing much more to structure our online software systems so that they harmonize and enhance the normative systems and cultural patterns that sustain users when they are not at their terminals.

Listserv & Usenet News provide two examples of computer networking technologies that enable important kinds of sociality, to be sure, but, left by themselves, have failed to build community. It is difficult to find community in unorganized, anonymous talk. Network services that do appear to be community-enhancing are almost always operated under a formal system --- usually involving a moderator or a steering committee. There are rules about what can be posted and often filtering of messages. One sees human organization layered on top of the bare technology and we have taken advantage of this relationship in the design of Comserve. We will now briefly describe some of the other principles and strategies that we have used to shape Comserve so that scholars find it socially comfortable, so that they find it "form fitting" in a social psychological sense.

Principles

Shape the technology for the user. We knew that academics would find many of the concepts associated with electronic mail technology somewhat alien so we tried to translate these concepts into terms that our users would find more familiar. We also knew that our users would need a success experience with Comserve to get them to come back again. So we emphasized friendliness in Comserve's design --- not only by making it easy to use but by incorporating lots of feedback to the user. Comserve acknowledges any contact with it by returning a series of orientational materials that provide information about how to use the service. If you ask for a file, it tells you that it's been sent and how large it is so that you can estimate how long it might take before it arrives. If you send Comserve an erroneous command, it tries to figure out what you want and suggests some possibilities for what you could do on the next try.

Use the technology to duplicate structures in the discipline. We believe that information technologies will ultimately change the nature of scholarly productivity and pedagogical practice. But first we need to let people find familiar places in the technology and engage in familiar and useful activities. It seems incredible to us that with so much human effort and money invested in the international research and education networks, there remains only a handful of projects one can point to and see that the project's guiding idea was to facilitate or enhance preexisting activities that researchers and educators deem valuable. In Comserve, we made a conscious decision to duplicate traditional divisions of research in the field in our conferencing services. We also made an attempt to use the technology to do things that are so much easier, faster, or cheaper with e-mail than hard print. For example, Comserve provides one hotline dedicated to circulating position announcements and another dedicated to distributing notices of new and recently published books of relevance to our users. We have tried to target our services precisely at the teaching and research needs of users from our field. Conversely this means that we have never sought to export our conferences or our services to the mass audiences of Usenet or Gopher. We do not hide them, but we do not advertise them outside of their intended audience.

Shape the service so that it recreates existing leadership structures. We think it is very important to find ways to recreate familiar hierarchy by including established disciplinary leaders and so we have specifically worked to incorporate our discipline's leaders into the service. They have served as issue editors for EJC/REC, as invited contributors to our Master Scholars database collection, and as invited guests to be interviewed in special hotline conferences. We've also set our sights on trying to attract younger and highly energetic scholars --- offering them possibilities to execute their projects through and with Comserve and thus, in a strong sense, creating a new leadership structure related to Comserve and the networks. These people are excited about electronic communication and they have the energy to take risks with this new medium. They are the next generation of leadership, which we hope will make significant use of computer mediated communication.

Integrate the community. Some of our channels for communication are devoted solely to letting others know about what is happening in various corners of the user community: "InterCom" is a conference that weaves together the membership of all the public hotlines so that we can distribute information about what's happening in one area of the service to everyone with one message. "Newsline" is the channel we use for the online newsletter of the CIOS, which brings people up to date on additions to the database, changes in the service, and other new projects that individuals have taken on. "Comserve Connections" is the name of our hard print newsletter, which is devoted to spreading the word about our activities to those who still haven't gotten onto the networks. We hope to create the impression that people can't afford not to be involved with network activities in our discipline. We created a parent organization for Comserve --- the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship --- and incorporated it as a not-for-profit organization with 501(3)(c) status. This allows individuals to deduct financial donations made in support of Comserve when they become CIOS members. We expect that the membership will become the backbone of a new scholarly organization that will help to sustain Comserve and the place of electronic communication in the future.

Though in the first years we clearly saw our challenge in terms of gaining users, we now see it in somewhat different terms. We are now routinely accessed from virtually every major academic center in the developed world. At current count, we've been accessed from 34,000 computer addresses in 57 countries. Gratefully, most of these users cycle through the academy (we've never had to entertain 33,000 users at once!). However, we are now serving a sustaining community of 7,000 users --- giving us more users today than there are students at a large proportion of American colleges and universities. To mention one or two other statistics: our public hotline system has processed 37,000 subscriptions, and it has delivered 25,000 messages.

Given our current rates of growth, the service has become overwhelmingly large and we are, you might say, teetering on the precipice of success. Because of this, we've placed further technological development of Comserve on a back burner and now concentrate almost exclusively on solving problems of long-term funding, of creating the kinds of social structures, funding initiatives, and fiscal policies that will assure the future of Comserve for the large number of users who have invested in Comserve's community. (Stephen & Harrison, in press).

In closing, we'd like to mention one other project that we are giving very high priority. Our experience with Comserve has convinced us of the value of disseminating our software concepts. We envision an international network of online scholarly centers, each administering appropriately to the research and educational needs of one of the academic disciplines (Harrison & Stephen, 1992). We're talking about an open, electronic university with a potential for global access. This is a vision in which human organization toward the enhancement of valued activities is at center stage with computer and information technologies playing a supporting role --- the reverse of what one sees in Usenet news, Gopher, WAIS, and unmoderated Listserv interaction. To date we've received approximately 25 letters from individuals who have inquired about setting up Comserve services for their own academic disciplines.

Unfortunately, we've not been able to accommodate these requests for help because our software is not in a suitable condition to be given to others. We need to repackage what we are doing into a simple system that can be operated with a minimum of fuss. Thus we are now beginning to look for help from private sector sources, foundations or any other agency truly committed to advancing the integration of information technologies in scholarship and education.

References

Harrison, T., Stephen, T. & Winter, J. (1991). "Online journals: Disciplinary designs for electronic scholarship." Public Access Computer Review 2(1), 25-38.

Harrison, T. M. & Stephen, T. (1992). "On-line disciplines: Computer-mediated scholarship for the humanities and social sciences." Computers and the Humanities 26, 13-25.

Stephen, T. & Harrison, T. M. (1991). Comserve User's Guide (3rd ed.). Rotterdam Junction, NY: Communication Institute for Online Scholarship.

Stephen, T. & Harrison, T. M. (in press). Online academic centres: Building a community of scholars electronically. Media Information Australia.