Weekend notes-to-oneself

9 and 10 Feb 2002
We are proposing to build and develop a MODEL for liberal arts colleges, using technologies that are readily available and even already in place on many campuses. The nexus can be expressed in several different ways, which are facets of a single something: INFORMATION is the core, and one view sees INFORMATION MANAGEMENT as an essential for teaching and learning, as necessary skills for teachers and learners. Another perspective sees INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE as the matrix of hardware and software that makes possible the 'managing' that people do as individuals and groups. Still another view emphasizes the expanding array of INFORMATION MEDIA that teachers and learners use and need to become better at using, far beyond print resources.

Libraries are becoming MORE central to teaching and learning by redefining and enlarging what they do. At the edges the services and capabilities libraries fuse with and melt into those involving computing and instructional technologies, and roles once clear and distinct (Librarian, Computer Technician, Media Person) blur and bleed. Responsibilities flow and divide, and gaps appear that nobody is quite prepared to fill.

Computers ARE essential tools in education, and they are gradually finding their way into more and more aspects of teaching and learning, and more and more INFORMATION is available in digital form, and distributed more and more widely. More and more, the computer is taken for granted as a basic TOOL.

People become converts to digital information as they recognize that they can realize what they formerly only imagined --that the technologies can deliver something distinctive, something transformative, something that enlarges possibilities. The magic doesn't work for everything, or for everybody: some activities are better in non-digital form, and some substitutions are mistakes, or simply wastes of time.

BUT digital information proliferates at vast scale and scope, and CAN be used in new ways, and CAN broaden what we know. Creative management of this proliferation is an enormous challenge.

Teaching and learning are problems of information management: finding, processing, organizing, storing, retrieving, analyzing, composing, revising, communicating, summarizing, distributing... We have a broad range of tools to carry out these activities, and computers are now central to many of them. People develop information management skills as they need them, but most prefer not to learn 'technical' skills if they can simply get the work done without, and user interfaces for software products facilitate this.

We (like all liberal arts colleges) have huge investment in hardware, and provide access to all corners of the campus, and links to the world outside. Our library systems distribute full text and database services. We (like other places) explore the uses of computers in classrooms, and expect that students and faculty and staff will use computers in more and more aspects of their work. The conduits are in place, the basic skills are fairly well developed, and there is a level of expectation that transformative things are about to happen. Every innovation opens unforeseen possibilities, generally producing ever greater floods of information and widening the array among which teachers and learners can choose. The next steps are integrative, and will link the various constituencies, but who is responsible for the next steps in evolution --for their conceptualization and development and implementation?

Each constituency on a college campus must balance both a traditional view of of its capabilities and responsibilities, and a continually evolving spectrum of new potentials and challenges. Thus, networked computers have transformed Media Centers into Instructional Technology Groups, responsible for innovation and support of faculty efforts to integrate electronic media into classroom teaching; libraries need to continue to manage traditional print media, but must also develop support for management and effective distribution of digital archives and for a growing array of data formats and information resources; computing support must maintain existing networks while experimenting with new hardware and applications and anticipating growing demand for services and bandwidth; teaching faculty balance disciplinary identity and career progress with opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, and must also keep abreast of moving frontiers of research and instructional technologies; and students experience both the growth that has always occurred in four years of college activities and a rapidly-changing array of technological possibilities --the computers they arrived with as freshmen are surely obsolete before they graduate.

Appropriate anticipation of the directions and consequences of technological evolution has always challenged institutions, and surprises seem to come out of nowhere. The Web itself was one such development of the last decade, and challenges like virus epidemics and the bandwidth crisis touched off by unanticipated peer-to-peer demand (Napster and mp3 traffic) have been felt on campuses everywhere.

The image of the Library as a center of campus life is carefully nurtured at most colleges, but the traditional venues of reference room, book stacks, study carrels and circulation desk are now partial manifestations of the information services that the library provides, and more and more information transactions take place outside the library's walls. The library (and the services it provides and mediates) is potentially MORE closely linked to classrooms, offices and dormitories than before, and must work to further develop this extramural integration.

A naïve view of the digital library sees everything now in print converted to 1s and 0s and accessible from ubiquitous computing devices, and users freed from the need to enter a building or consult a librarian. This vision misses the real point of the digital evolution: the traditional library is not replaced by a digital version of itself, but rather the familiar services are greatly enhanced and expanded by the incorporation of digital forms of information. In this broadened vision, librarians become more important to library users as the collections they organize and maintain grow and add a wider range of information media. At the same time, users build and organize and maintain their own personal and group digital libraries --that's what folders on hard drives, and shared work spaces, and Web pages are really all about. The really interesting challenge is connecting the personal and the group and the institutional realizations of the digital library.

The 'digital revolution' and 'ubiquitous computing' and a 'global infosphere' are manifestations of a single emerging phenomenon: we can carry our personal information universes around with us. In fact we have always done that, more or less, by carrying our brains around, and many thousands of years of evolution have seen the expansion of such universes. There have been some quantum leaps, both quantitative and qualitative. The print revolution provided us with a medium for storage and replication and distribution, but also meant that portability was reduced, and access to the vastly increased volume of potential information became a problem. Technologies for recording of sound and images produced further expansions. Before I started using computers, my own information universe was contained in the books I owned and read, notes and other things I wrote, various other storage media (photographs, maps, LP disks), and memories.

At present we don't know who else is working on this integration of digital media. Certainly there are people at our peer institutions who are working on extending various applications, and on connecting them to other applications, and I expect to discover novel integrations and projects on various campuses. What I find in 3 months of sabbatical visiting may lead me to revise plans. I would like to discover that I have counterparts on other campuses, with whom I share a vision, or with whom a shared vision can be built and realized.

The practical linchpin of my current vision of digital library development is active Web pages: the use of the Web browser to interact with database applications, to search and retrieve, and to add information. This has obvious value for managing one's own information universe and personal digital library, but it is the prospect of group use of shared resources that has pedagogical and consortial implications. Members of a working group or a class can use the Web as a communication environment, a means to display and contribute, to query and respond, to share data (text, images, numbers, etc.) for local use and to upload local material for wider distribution. Members can work asynchronously and from different locations on the globe, and there is also the possibility of public distribution of a group's work, as public Web pages and also by inclusion in larger digital libraries via metadata protocols such as Dublin Core (linking through online library catalogs) and distribution services sich as geographynetwork.com (for spatial data).

There is nothing very complicated about the enabling technologies (.asp, JavaScript, SQL), which means that development to suit local needs can take place without exotic hardware and software, and is well within the capabilities of student programmers. The great gains come as a product of linkage of common applications which manage information in various media: a map displayed by an ArcIMS server can provide a query interface for a collection of texts or images or metadata records located on a separate server, and a user can use the Web interface to add to that collection, or might contribute a comment to a database on a different server.

Each institution has programs and individuals for whom such a distributed environment would be an effective solution to a pedagogical or collaborative problem, but it is inefficient to build custom implementations for each case, and such application development has no obvious institutional home --it is not the responsibility of computing or media or library personnel because it does not fit solely within the terms of reference of one or another of these departments or competencies, and building such an application requires a set of skills that is rarely found in a single person. This is the realm of collaborative teams with complementary skills and knowledge.