Hello all.  If you substitute "Museum" for "library", "object" for "book",
"virtual museum" for "electronic library" (you get the picture. .), this
article has a lot of food for thought.
Allison
 
 
 
From:    IN%"[log in to unmask]"   "Louise S. Robbins SLIS 263-2105"
To:      [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
 [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask]
Subject: really worth reading
 
>From:    IN%"[log in to unmask]"   "Sue Searing"
>To:      [log in to unmask]
>Subject: A long but insightful article...
>
>There's food for thought in this article.  Hope you all haven't seen it before
>on other listservers; it's new to me.        Sue
>
>From:    IN%"[log in to unmask]"   "LIBrary Women And Technology"
>To:      Multiple recipients of list LIBWAT-L <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Karen Coyle's Talk at CPSR
>
>Here is the text of Karen's talk, courtesy of KC.
>
>--leslie shade
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>**************************************
>*   Copyright Karen Coyle, 1994      *
>*                                    *
>*  This document may be              *
>* circulated freely on the Net       *
>* with this statement included.      *
>* For any commercial use, or         *
>* publication (including electronic  *
>* journals, you must obtain the      *
>* permission of the author           *
>*   [log in to unmask]              *
>**************************************
>
>ACCESS: Not Just Wires
>By Karen Coyle
>
>** This is the written version of a talk given at the 1994 CPSR Annual
>meeting in San Diego, CA, on Oct. 8. **
>
>I have to admit that I'm really sick and tired of the Information highway.
>I feel like I've already heard so much about it that it must be come and
>gone already, yet there is no sign of it.  This is truly a piece of federal
>vaporware.
>
>I am a librarian, and I and it's especially strange to have dedicated  much
>of your life to the careful tending of our current information
>infrastructure, our libraries, only to wake up one morning to find that the
>entire economy of the nation depends on making information commercially
>viable.  There's an element of Twilight Zone about this because libraries
>are probably our most underfunded and underappreciated of institutions, with
>the possible exception of day care centers.
>
>It's clear to me that the information highway isn't much about information.
>It's about trying to find a new basis for our economy.  I'm pretty sure I'm
>not going to like the way information is treated in that economy.  We know
>what kind of information sells, and what doesn't.  So I see our future as
>being a mix of highly expensive economic reports and cheap online versions
>of the National Inquirer.  Not a pretty picture.
>
>This is a panel on "access."  But I am not going to talk about access from
>the usual point of view of physical or electronic access to the FutureNet.
>Instead I am going to talk about intellectual access to materials and the
>quality of our information infrastructure, with the emphasis on
>"information.". Information is a social good and part of our "social
>responsibility" is that we must take this resource seriously.
>
>>From the early days of our being a species with consciousness of its own
>history, some part of society has had the role of preserving this history:
>priests, learned scholars, archivists.  Information was valued; valued
>enough to be denied to some members of society; to be part of the ritual of
>belonging to an elite.
>
>So I find it particularly puzzling that as move into this new "information
>age" that our efforts are focused on the machinery of the information
>system, while the electronic information itself is being treated like just
>so much more flotsam and jetsam; this is not a democratization of
>information, but a devaluation of information.
>
> On the Internet, many electronic information sources that we are declaring
>worthy of "universal access" are administered by part-time volunteers;
>graduate students who do eventually graduate, or network  hobbyists.
>Resources come and go without notice, or languish after an initial effort
>and rapidly become out of date.  Few network information resources have
>specific and reliable funding for the future.  As a telecommunications
>system the Internet is both modern and mature; as an information system the
>Internet is an amateur operation.
>
>Commercial information resources, of course, are only interested in
>information that provides revenue.  This immediately eliminates the entire
>cultural heritage of poetry, playwriting, and theological thought, among
 others.
>
>If we value our intellectual heritage, and if we truly believe that access
>to information (and that broader concept, knowledge) is a valid social goal,
>we have to take our information resources seriously.  Now I know that
>libraries aren't perfect institutions.  They tend to be somewhat slow-moving
>and conservative in their embrace of new technologies; and some seem more
>bent on hoarding than disseminating information.  But what we call "modern
>librarianship" has over a century of experience in being the tender of this
>society's information resources.  And in the process of developing and
>managing that resource, the library profession has understood its
>responsibilities in both a social and historical context.  Drawing on that
>experience, I am going to give you a short lesson on social responsibilities
>in an information society.
>
>Here are some of our social responsibilities in relation to information:
>Collection
>Selection
>Preservation
>Organization
>Dissemination
>
>Collection:
>It is not enough to passively gather in whatever information comes your way,
>like a spider waiting on its web.  Information collection is an activity,
>and an intelligent activity.  It is important to collect and collocate
>information units that support, complement and even contradict each other.
>A collection has a purpose and a context; it says something about the
>information and it says something about the gatherer of that information.
>It is not random, because information itself is not random, and humans do
>not produce information in a random fashion.
>
>Too many Internet sites today are a terrible hodge-podge, with little
>intellectual purpose behind their holdings.  It isn't surprising that
>visitors to these sites have a hard time seeing the value of the information
>contained therein.  Commercial systems, on the other hand, have no incentive
>to provide an intellectual balance that might "confuse" its user.
>
>In all of the many papers that have come out of discussion of the National
>Information Infrastructure, it is interesting that there is no mention of
>collecting information: there is no Library of Congress or National Archive
>of the electronic inforamtion world.  So in the whole elaborate scheme, no
>one is responsbile for the collection of information.
>
>Selection:
>Not all information is equal.  This doesn't mean that some of it should be
>thrown away, though inevitably there is some waste in the information world.
>And this is not in support of censorship.  But there's a difference between
>a piece on nuclear physics by a Nobel laureate and a physics diorama entered
>into a science fair by an 8-year-old.  And there's a difference between
>alpha release .03 and beta 1.2 of a software package.  If we can't
>differentiate between these, our intellectual future looks grim indeed.
>
>Certain sources become known for their general reliability, their
>timeliness, etc.  We have to make these judgments because the sheer quantity
>of information is too large for us to spend our time with lesser works when
>we haven't yet encountered the greats.
>
>This kind of selection needs to be done with an understanding of a
>discipline and understanding of the users of a body of knowledge.  The
>process of selection overlaps with our concept of education, where members
>of our society are directed to a particular body of knowledge that we hold
>to be key to our understanding of the world.
>
>Preservation:
>How much of what is on the Net today will exist in any form ten years from
>now?  And can we put any measure to what we lose if we do not preserve
>things systematically?  If we can't preserve it all, at least in one safely
>archived copy, are we going to make decisions about preservation, or will we
>leave it up to a kind of information Darwinianism?  As we know, the true
>value of some information may not be immediately known, and some ideas gain
>in value over time.
>
>The commercial world, of course, will preserve only that which sells best.
>
>Organization:
>This is an area where the current Net has some of its most visible problems,
>as we have all struggled through myriad gopher menus, ftp sites, and web
>pages looking for something that we know is there but cannot find.
>
>There is no ideal organization of information, but no organization is no
>ideal either.  The organization that exists today in terms of finding tools
>is an attempt to impose order over an unorganized body.  The human mind in
>its information seeking behavior is a much more complex question than can be
>answered with a keyword search in an unorganized information universe.  When
>we were limited to card catalogs and the placement of physical items on
>shelves, we essentially had to choose only one way to organize our
>information.  Computer systems should allow us to create a multiplicity of
>organization schemes for the same information, from traditional
>classification, that relies on hierarchies and categories, to faceted
>schemes, relevance ranking and feedback, etc.
>
>Unfortunately, documents do not define themselves.  The idea of doing
>WAIS-type keyword searching on the vast store of textual documents on the
>Internet is a folly.  Years of study of term frequency, co-occurrence and
>other statistical techniques have proven that keyword searching is a
>passable solution for some disciplines with highly specific vocabularies and
>nearly useless in all others.  And, of course, the real trick  is to match
>the vocaubulary of the seeker of information with that of the information
>resource.  Keyword searching not only doesn't take into account different
>terms for the same concepts, it doesn't take into account materials in other
>languages or different user levels (i.e. searching for children will
>probably need to be different than searching done by adults, and libraries
>actually use different subject access schemes for childrens' materials).
>And non-textual items (software, graphics, sound) do not respond at all to
>keyword searching.
>
>There is no magical, effortless way to create an organization for
>information; at least today the best tools are a clearly defined
>classification scheme and a human indexer.  At least a classification scheme
>or indexing scheme gives the searcher a chance to develop a rational
>strategy for searching.
>
>The importance of organizational tools cannot be overstated.  What it all
>comes down to is that if we can't find the information we need, it doesn't
>matter if it exists or not.  If we don't find it, we don't encounter it,
>then it isn't information. There are undoubtedly millions of bytes of files
>on the Net that for all practical purposes are non-existant .
>
>My biggest fear in relation to the information highway is that intellectual
>organization and access will be provided by the commercial world as a
>value-added service.  So the materials will exist, even at an affordable
>price, but it will cost real money to make use of the tools that will make
>it possible for you to find the information you need.   If we don't provide
>these finding tools as part of the public resource, then we aren't providing
>the information to the public.
>
>Dissemination:
>There's a lot of talk about the "electronic library".  Actually, there's a
>lot written about the electronic library, and probably much of it ends up on
>paper.  Most of us agree that for anything longer than a one-screen email
>message, we'd much rather read documents off a paper page than off a screen.
>While we can hope that screen technologies will eventually produce something
>that truly substitutes for paper, this isn't true today.  So what happens
>with all of those electronic works that we're so eager to store and make
>available?   Do we reverse the industrial revolution and return printing of
>documents to a cottage industry taking place in homes, offices and libraries?
>
>Many people talk about their concerns for the "last mile" - for the delivery
>of information into every home.  I'm concerned about the last yard .  We can
>easily move information from one computer to another, but how do we get it
>from the computer to the human being in the proper format?  Not all
>information is suited to electronic use.  Think of the auto repair manuals
>that you  drag under the car and drip oil on.  Think of children's books,
>with their drool-proof pages.
>
>Even the Library of Congress has announced that they are undertaking a huge
>project to digitize 5 million items from their collection.  Then what ?  How
>do they think we are going to make use of those materials?
>
>There are times when I can only conclude that we have been gripped by some
>strange madness.  I have fantasies of kidnapping the entire membership of
>the administration's IITF committees and tying them down in front of 14"
>screens with really bad flicker and forcing them to read the whole of
>Project Gutenberg's electronic copy of Moby Dick.  Maybe then we'd get some
>concern about the last yard.
>
>In conclusion:
>No amount of wiring will give us universal access
>Just adding more files and computers to gopherspace, webspace and FTPspace
>will not give us better access
>And commercial information systems can be expected to be.... commercial
Louise S. Robbins
Assistant Professor and Director, Laboratory Library
School of Library and Information Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
600 N. Park Street
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: 608-263-2105 (office) or 263-2963 (laboratory library)
[log in to unmask]     or     [log in to unmask]
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                                Allison Smith
                        University of Wisconsin Madison
                   School of Library and Information Studies
                            [log in to unmask]
 
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