technology, scholarship, and the humanities: the implications of electronic information

Leonardo

Technology, Scholarship, and the Humanities: The Implications of Electronic InformationAuthor(s): Vartan GregorianSource: Leonardo, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1994), pp. 129-133Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1575982 .

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CONFERENCE PAPER

Technology, Scholarship, and the

Humanities: The Implications of

Electronic Information

Vartan Gregorian

echnology brings us new resources for the establishment of coherence, connection and meaning. Univer- sities must create a relevant organizational structure to adapt to new technology, while maintaining its identity, values, principles and goals.

My interest in this conference stems from my concern about our divided knowledge, and its implications for education. I am also fascinated by the possibilities presented by technology for reintegrating knowledge and assisting universities in the task of resynthesizing information. We are moving rapidly to the dawn of an information revolution that may well parallel the Industrial Revolution in its impact and far-reaching conse-

quences. We are told that the total amount of collected information doubles every four years, yet the ratio of used information to available information is steadily decreasing.

We are unable to use 90% to 95% of the information that is

currently available, and nowhere is this more apparent than at the university, where the daunting arrival of information in the form of books and journals has been compounded by an accel-

erating electronic torrent from thousands of databases around the world. Today, at the touch of a computer keyboard, we can gain access to more information than we can possibly digest. But while it is true that attention to detail is a hallmark of pro- fessional excellence, it is equally true that an overload of undigested facts is a sure recipe for mental gridlock.

No wonder John Naisbitt, in his popular book Megatrends, bemoans the phenomenon that the world is "wallowing in detail, drowning in information, but is starved for knowl-

edge." Undigested facts do not amount to knowledge. The current proliferation of information is accompanied by its

corollary pitfalls, such as counterfeit information, inflation of information, and apparent, or real, obsolescence. I agree with Carlos Fuentes, who said that one of the greatest chal- lenges facing modern society and contemporary civilization is how to transform information into knowledge. Our universities, colleges, libraries, learned societies, and contemporary scholars, more than ever before, have a fundamental historical and social task and responsibility to ensure that we provide not training, but education; and not only education, but culture as well. We must provide not just information, but its distillation, namely knowledge, in order to protect our society against counterfeit information disguised as knowledge.

This is not an easy task, because in addition to an explosion of information and knowledge, we also face dangerous levels of fragmentation in knowledge dictated by the advances of sciences, learning, and the accumulation of over two thou-

sand years of scholarship. Max Weber criticized the narrowness, the absence of spirit, of modern intellectual specialists. It was this

phenomenon that prompted Dostoevsky to lament, in The Brothers Karamazov, about scholars "who have only analyzed the parts, and overlooked the whole, and indeed their blindness is marvelous." It was the same phe-

ABSTRACT

The author discusses his concerns about the fragmentation of knowledge, resulting from more than 2,000 years of information collection, which is exacerbated by the recent explosion in information technologies. The growth and fragmentation of knowledge has re- sulted in a proliferation of specialties, which is reflected in the expanding curricula of the universities. Specialization, instead of uniting human values and discourse, allows us to organize ourselves into separate communities. At the same time, information technologies present us with the opportunity and tools for meeting the chal- lenges caused by the explosion of information and fragmentation of knowledge.

nomenon that Ortega y Gasset described in the 1930s in Re- volt of the Masses as "the barbarism of specialization." "We have today," he wrote, "more scientists, more scholars, more pro- fessional men and women than ever before, but many fewer cultivated ones."

The university, which was to embody the unity of knowledge, has become an intellectual "multiversity." The process of both growth and fragmentation, underway since the seventeenth century, has accelerated in our century and will inten- sify in the twenty-first. Today, universities consist of a tangle of specialties and subspecialties, disciplines and subdisciplines, within which further specialization continues apace. The unity of knowledge has collapsed, and the scope and intensity of specialization is such that scholars, even scientists, have great difficulty keeping up with the important developments in their own subspecialties, not to mention their field in general.

As Wayne Booth put it wistfully in his 1987 Ryerson lecture,

Centuries have passed since the fateful moment ... was it in the eighteenth century or the late seventeenth century? ... when the last of the Leonardo da Vincis could hope to cover the cognitive map. Since that fatal moment everyone has been reduced to knowing only one or two countries on the intellectual globe.

In the universities we are smitten by our pride, as for one reason or another we discover what a pitifully small corner of the cognitive world we live in. The knowledge explosion left us ignorant of vast fields of knowledge that every educated man or woman ought to have known. The growth and fragmentation of knowledge, and proliferation of specialties, is in

Vartan Gregorian, University Hall, Brown University, One Prospect Street, Providence, RI 02912, U.S.A.

Paper presented at the conference "Technology, Scholarship, and the Humanities: The Implications of Electronic Information," 30 September-2 October 1992, Irvine, Califor- nia, organized by the Getty Art History Information Program and the American Coun- cil of Learned Societies.

LEONARDO, Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 129-133, 1994 129 ? 1994 ISAST



turn reflected in the curricula of our universities. There are currently, I am told, more than one thousand different

undergraduate majors and programs of- fered in America's colleges and universities. This, in turn, has led to the phenomenon that our students often learn to frame only those questions that can be addressed through the specialized methodologies of their particular disci-

plines and subdisciplines. It was to address this kind of ahis-

torical, uncontextual, academic isola- tionism that the late Charles Franklin, the Columbia University philosopher, wrote, "When the study of human experience turns entirely inward, upon itself, it becomes the study of the study of the

study of human experience. As the study of the study of the study, it does not achieve greater objectivity, but merely becomes thinner." In every generation in which the humanities have shown vi-

tality they have refreshed their thinking by learning from other disciplines, and

they have looked beyond their books to the primary materials that have made the books. They have preferred and per- formed an essential public, civic, educa- tional function, namely the criticism and reintegration of ideas and values of cultures dislocated from their traditions and needing a new sense of meaning.

Unfortunately, in our universities to-

day the triumph of the monograph, or scientific investigation, over synthesis, has further fragmented the common- wealth of learning and undermined our sense of commitment to the grand end of synthesis, general understanding and the integration of knowledge. According to William Bouwsma, specialization, instead of uniting human beings into a

general community of values and discourse, has by necessity divided them into small and exclusive coteries, narrow in outlook and interest. It isolates and alienates human beings. Social relations, as a result, cease to be the expression of common perceptions and common be- liefs; they are reduced to political relations, to the interplay of competitive, and often antagonistic, groups. Special- ized education makes our students into instruments to serve the specialized needs of a society of specialists.

Faced with the explosion of information and its fragmentation, as well as the

proliferation of disciplines and subdisci-

plines, the faculties of our universities are confronted with the difficult choice of balancing analysis with synthesis, methodology, and the relevant course content, thus placing more and more

responsibility on the student to form his own synthesis. These developments are what perturbed Bouwsma in his brilliant 1975 essay "The Models of an Educated Man." He wrote:

The idea of the educated man has also been deeply affected by the "knowledge revolution," out of which has emerged the conception of education as preparation for research. As long as knowledge was limited, relatively simple, and not very technical, education could be fairly eclectic. Although it regularly emphasized the formation of character, it could attempt at the same time to discipline the mental faculties, provide a common culture, and supply a minimum of substantive knowledge. Yet obviously, the sheer bulk of the knowledge now deemed necessary for an educated person has squeezed out of education-and for the most part, even out of our understanding of it-everything but the acquisition of knowledge in some mono- graphic form. One result has been a broad decline in the idea of a general education, which for all practical purposes has become little more than a nostalgic memory. Indeed, the body of requisite knowledge has become so vast that no one can hope to master more than a small segment of it. So, in the popular mind, an educated person is now some kind of a specialist; and, in a sense, we no longer have a single conception of the educated man, but as many conceptions as there are learned specialties.

Nowhere is this better reflected than in the concept of literacy itself; it too has lost its unity, it too has been fragmented. According to The Oxford Unabridged Dictio-

nary, literacy is the quality or state of be-

ing literate, the possession of education, especially the ability to read and write.

Today we are using the term "illiterate" as a euphemism for ignorance of a given subject matter, and the term "literate" to refer to knowledge of a specific subject matter. We have proponents of "func- tional literacy," "technological literacy," "computer literacy," "civic literacy," "historical literacy," "cultural literacy," "ana-

lytical literacy," "mathematical literacy," "geographical literacy," "scientific lit-

eracy," "ethical literacy," "artistic literacy," and (my favorite) "managerial literacy." Born in the pages of the New York Times, this literacy consists of 1200 terms. We are told that if you score 80% or more, you should feel confident that you can

engage in meaningful conversations with other experienced managers. One word that I learned was "tasksatisfizing," which means the acceptance of satisfactory levels of performance of many orders. In conclusion, there are at present too

many facts, too many theories, subjects,

and specializations to permit the ar-

rangement of all knowledge into an ac-

ceptable hierarchy. Without opportuni- ties for creative discourse among educated persons, both within and without the university, without the broad un-

derstanding of the premises and assump- tions of various academic disciplines, it is not easy for either student or faculty, or

lay men and women, to pursue complex problems that cut across the artificial barriers between the disciplines.

Today, in our universities, we face the

challenge of integrating and resynthesizing the compartmentalized knowledge of disparate fields. Clearly, our age of excessive specialization and fragmentation of knowledge does not call for the abandonment of specialization: After all, the division of labor has greatly ad- vanced the cause of civilization. Special- ization has always been hailed as an in- strument for progress. It has been a source of the general conception of excellence. Complexity, by necessity, has

always required specialization in pursuit of the discovery of solutions.

The answer, then, is not to call for an end to specialization, nor for the castiga- tion of those humanists and social scientists who avail themselves of scientific methods and technology, nor of those who attempt to provide rigid analyses of

literary texts, social trends, and historical facts. This, in my opinion, is to in-

dulge in unwarranted snobbery. To scorn sociology for its jargon while ex-

onerating philology, philosophy, aes- thetics, and literary criticism from that sin is equally unwarranted. Such attitudes remind me of the Anglican bishop who told the Episcopal bishop, "Brother, we both serve the Lord, you in your way and I in His."

The scientific passion of verifiability, the habit of testing and correcting a

concept through its consequences in ex-

perience, is just as firmly rooted in the humanities as it is in the sciences. As

early as 1944, Jose Ortega y Gasset pre- scribed a solution to our dilemma in The Mission of the University. He wrote:

The need to create sound syntheses and systematizations of knowledge . . . will call out a kind of scientific genius which hitherto has existed only as an aberration-the genius for integration. Of necessity, this means specialization as all creative effort inevitably does; but this time the person will be specializing in the construction of a whole. The momentum which impels investigation to dissociate indefinitely into particular problems-the pulverization of research-makes necessary a compensa- tory control . . . which is to be fur-

130 Gregorian, Technology, Scholarship and the Humanities



nished by a force pulling in the oppo- site direction, constraining centrifugal science in a wholesome organization.

The selection of professors will de-

pend not on their rank as investigators, but on their talent for synthesis.

The need for breadth of coverage in-

evitably conflicts with the need for cov-

erage in depth. It is the depth, rather than the breadth, of humanistic education which we must now defend. The

ability to make connections among seemingly disparate disciplines, and to

integrate them in ways that benefit the

scholarly community, hence the educa- tional process, is our major challenge. Our scholars and our students must be skilled at synthesis as well as analysis, and they must be technologically astute and literate. Within the university communities, in particular, we must create an intellectual climate for an integral process of societal change. We must en-

courage our educators to encourage our students to bridge the boundaries between the disciplines and make connections that produce deeper insights.

The new information technologies are the driving force behind both the

explosion of information and the fragmentation of knowledge. Information

technologies contribute to the explosion of information by shrinking the traditional barriers of time and space, giv- ing us the ability to record, organize, and quickly communicate vast amounts of information. The entire corpus of Greek and Latin literature, for example, can fit on a CD-ROM (Compact Disc- Read Only Memory) and be carried in-

conspicuously in a jacket pocket. If a friend in Paris would like to see an article you have just written, a copy of it can be transferred to him or her in seconds by the international Internet. If one inquires about articles written on

pituitary surgery in the last year, the ab- stracts are available within seconds, and the article itself arriving by fax within the hour. Soon, we are told, any book or article on the most abstruse bit of information will be instantly available from

any networked computer. This will com-

pound documents with photographs, live graphics, and hypertext links that will take the reader instantly to any other related book or article.

That is the future, and it is probably nearer than we think. But our primary problem as universities is not engineer-

ing that future. We must rise above the obsession with quantity of information and speed of transmission, and recog- nize that the key issue for us is our abil-

ity to organize this information once it has been amassed-to assimilate it, find

meaning in it, and assure its survival for use by generations to come.

Information technologies also contribute to the fragmentation of knowledge by allowing us to organize ourselves into

ever-more-specialized communities. Are

you developing an interest in exotic in- sects, rare minerals, or an obscure poet? With little effort you can use electronic mail and conferencing to find several others in Japan, Peru, or Bulgaria with whom you can communicate every day, creating your own small, self-confirming world of theory, technique, and method-

ology. McLuhan's prediction that electronic communication would create a

global village is wrong, in my opinion. What is being created is less like a village than an entity that reproduces the worst

aspects of urban life: the ability to retreat into small communities of the like- minded, safe not only from unnecessary interactions with those whose ideas and attitudes are not like our own, but safe from having to relate our interests and results to other communities.

As well as encouraging the formation of specialist communities, the new information technologies contribute to fragmentation in other ways. The new electronic formats and computer techniques, with special terminology, equipment, and methodology, nicely support the de-

velopment of "priesthoods" and esoteric communities. This is not just a quarrel between traditional scholars and a generation with new ideas and new instruments. It is increasingly a conflict that is

played out whenever any group uses the new technology to construct information formats or techniques that prove unnec-

essarily forbidding to any but the initi- ated. This may not require malign intent, only ignorance and indifference to the

larger issues of scholarship and communication in a technological society.

Paradoxically, information technology also presents us with the opportunity and the tools for meeting the challenge of the explosion of information and the

fragmentation of knowledge. If, on the one hand, the new information tech-

nologies seem fragmenting, they are also

profoundly integrative. Remember, these

technologies are fundamentally communication technologies, and their deploy- ment at the university is, as often as not, an exploration of new connections

among the traditional disciplines, new

ways of finding significance and mean-

ing. The process of assimilating new information technologies can, in the right

setting, help us think hard and deeply about the nature of knowledge, and even about our mission as a university.

T. S. Eliot, in one of his early commen- taries on Dante's Inferno, described Hell as a place "where nothing connects with

nothing." The condition of absurdity and anomie is often noted as a distinc- tive liability of modern intellectual life. Now, near the end of the twentieth cen-

tury, this threat may seem to have reached its epitome in the explosion and fragmentation of information caused by our new technology. In fact, while the threat is real enough, the new

technology brings us new resources for the establishment of coherence, connection, and meaning. That is why this

meeting is so important-to bring the

practitioners, the theorists, the academ- ics, and administrators together in search of a new pathway for integrating knowledge and affecting the course of education delivery.

Is this a revolution? In my opinion, yes. Technologically, the dizzying rate of

performance improvements in com-

puter hardware is matched only by an

equally dizzying drop in costs. No one who reads the newspapers can have missed the comparison between the ex-

pensive, massive computer of two de- cades ago, which required teams of ex-

perts to operate, and its contemporary equivalent, a small, pleasingly designed, one-thousand-dollar appliance on the desk of ajunior high school student.

Advances in telecommunications

technology also show a startling accel- eration. There are now nearly 10 billion users of the worldwide Internet, which connects over 500,000 host computers, and new hosts and users are being added every day. Electronic mail, network file transfer, and remote searching of databases are now a fact of academic life, totally integrated into faculty members' working routine. Software im-

provements are also impressive. While the difficult user interfaces of older software required a considerable invest- ment in time, today intuitive graphic interfaces and improved program design have made it easy for students to use a

sophisticated program the first time

they encounter it. These programs give their users extraordinary powers, allow-

ing them to pose and answer questions in minutes that might have taken teams of technicians weeks or months using traditional methods.

While the rate of technological change is dramatic, equally dramatic will be the changes in our organizational

Gregorian, Technology, Scholarship and the Humanities 131



structures necessary to accommodate

technological advances. The relevant or-

ganizational structure must change to

adapt to the new technology. Until that

happens, the real revolution of technol-

ogy in higher education will not have occurred.

This was the case for printing, the In- dustrial Revolution, the automobile, air travel, and radio and television. New

technology per se is not revolution; the revolution is the difference in how we

organize, structure, and empower our lives. This is, of course, the source of

many of our problems. How do we adapt our organizations and social structures to these technological changes? How do we exploit technological developments while subordinating them to our larger purposes? We are too often putting new wine in old bottles. But discovering the new organizational forms that are re-

quired is hard, not just because it is difficult to understand the nature and significance of the changes in information

technology, but because organizational innovation requires a sure grasp of our mission and identity as an institution.

Once these forms are recognized, implementing them requires ingenuity, commitment, and, above all else, risk and courage. Although the revolution is far from over, there may be a lull of sorts ahead. It is about time for the enthusi- asm and revolutionary fervor regarding the new technology to subside for a bit, while the methods of exploiting the

technology are evaluated and integrated into the historical identity of institutions. Although not a time of high drama, such lulls can, in fact, be the most crucial periods of revolutionary change.

This is the time to separate the con- fusions and self-deceptions from the truths and insights, and to effect the real information technology revolution

by adjusting our organizational structures to discern, accommodate, assimilate, and exploit what is lasting and valuable in these technological devel-

opments. In short, these lulls are times of evaluation and integration, and that is the business, unfortunately, of presidents of universities.

What can a president do? The role of the president, of course, is not to lead the development of new information

technologies, nor even to herald their arrival, argue their importance, or warn of their dangers. If presidents are suc- cessful at their leadership and managerial tasks, then there will be plenty of

others who will be doing those things within the university community. The role of the president is to establish a

process that will promote the integration of these new technologies, with each other and with the mission and the core values of the university. It is one of active moral and intellectual leadership. This is hard, and some days the president will be beset by the prophets of the new technology, as I have been. They will grab you by the arm and whisper in

your ear, feverishly pressing upon you the revelation that "Things are com-

pletely different now.... We are being left behind." On other days, you will be

dogged by self-styled protectors of an- cient wisdom and the old ways. "What is

good is not new, and what is new is not

good," they will whisper darkly. You will think your faculty and advisers have all become pre-Socratic: "Everything is

changing," announce the breathless Heracliteans; "Nothing changes," warn the gloomy Parmenideans. To both you will give the same Aristotelian answer: "Some things change, and some things remain the same."

Our identity, values, principles, and

goals remain the same. The technological accidentals we use to exemplify these values in the twentieth century will vary. In fact, these must vary, for we cannot remain the same in our essentials unless we change in our accidentals to meet the new circumstances. The president must create the climate where risk-tak-

ing and innovative solutions are encour-

aged. But most of all the president must create a community that is totally in- formed regarding the values and peculiar identity of our institution. If that can be achieved, and if all members of the

university can trust each other to be mo- tivated by the same shared values, then the community can move forward to address the problems of technology and the integration of knowledge.

Very few institutions will be on the so- called "leading edge" of the technology revolution, but none can escape the risk-

taking and wrenching changes necessary to assimilate its results into its own mission and peculiar identity. Every institution will be the site of its own convulsion, each will have its own special solution, and each will contribute something unique to the collective effort to advance

learning, education, and culture. One more item: Brown University's

own mission. I mention Brown because, like Dartmouth and Carnegie Mellon, Brown was a pioneer in the 1970s for

historical reasons. Tom Watson, the head of IBM, was a Brown graduate, as were Fred Wang andJohn Sculley. In the seventies, Brown made a conscious deci- sion to use computing and telecommunications in academic life. Since then, Brown has implemented a sophisticated technology infrastructure and made access to these technologies a way of life for students, staff, and faculty. It has de-

veloped a support structure within both the computing organization and the li-

brary, to help users effectively utilize these resources. It has made strides to

provide more and more information

electronically. Ruling all of our thinking, planning,

and implementation during this period is the principle that technology must be

fundamentally integrated and aligned with the mission and identity of the uni-

versity. It is no longer a luxury, but a ne-

cessity. Although the basic vision of

building a network of scholars' worksta- tions is now fairly commonplace, Brown introduced this model to the academic

community in the early 1980s. Through the efforts of IRIS, the Institute for Re- search in Information and Scholarship, and the Scholars' Workstation Project, Brown has articulated a vision of the future academy where an electronic com-

munity of students and scholars would have the entire world of information at their fingertips. They would be able to

navigate through the centuries of text, images, video, and sound with ease.

Readily at hand would be intuitive tools for capturing and analyzing this information, as well as the reference sources to immediately satisfy the most arcane

query. Intense interaction between fac-

ulty and students would be supported by this information. Infrastructure and special interest groups would form both lo- cal and worldwide electronic seminars.

Our guiding principles have been the

following: that the information, resources, and strategies must be inte-

grated into Brown's basic identity as a

single community of scholars-a univer-

sity college committed to traditional ide- als of liberal learning and intellectual

community. The focus is not technology, but information and its associated meth-

odologies of analysis, synthesis, and communication. The real revolution in information technology is about communication, not computation. We are committed to providing basic levels of resources and services to all members of the Brown University community, not just to those who have been the tradi-

132 Gregorian, Technology, Scholarship and the Humanities



tional beneficiaries of technology. Among other things, this means that there is no charge to individuals or academic units for any computing or net-

working services. The institution has taken the position that the information

technology should be a basic feature of

university life, similar to the library. The pursuit of our vision is then

guided by the basic principles described above. These principles have helped us formulate our goals and objectives for the next five years which have fallen into three broad, interrelated categories: content, access, and guidance.

Content: To provide a full array of ma- chine-readable documents, reference materials, and serials, including schol-

arly texts, images, databases, campus publications and documents, and materials that support teaching, such as course reserves and syllabi. These resources may be maintained locally, or accessed remotely over the network.

Access: To make these databases ac- cessible to a variety of desktop plat- forms in the library, the Center for In- formation Technology, faculty offices, laboratories, classrooms, dormitories, and private residences-wherever Brown scholars are at work-and to in-

tegrate these resources with personal information management tools used by students and faculty.

Guidance: To provide the counseling, training, and assistance necessary to

guide students and faculty through the

rapidly changing world of new information sources, formats, and methodology, thus to help transform information into

knowledge. After identifying the goals and objec-

tives that make sense for one's institution, the next step is the process of de-

veloping and implementing strategies that will achieve those goals. These strat-

egies will almost certainly require, among other things, supplementing the

staffing of the library, the computer center, and the individual departments. In an era of fixed resources, this means re-

allocating existing resources. Growth can only be by substitution, not by addition. During the past three years we have reallocated $2 million from our base budget for top priorities, and a stu-

dent-faculty advisory committee moni- tors every penny. We also have decided that technology replacement-periodic replenishment of our technological re-

sources-has to be part of the basic bud-

get because acquisition is not enough. Institutionalizing is a must.

Having said all of this, let me also mention some of my concerns. One is the li-

brary of the future. As a member of RLG and the OCLC advisory group, and as former President of the New York Public

Library, I have always worried about the status of librarians. If we are interested in

technological change, we should first ex- amine how we are treating our university librarians. We are treating them as auxil-

iary entities, not as central to the univer-

sity. The first time I met the New York Public Library librarians, I addressed them as "my fellow educators," and they were astonished because they did not consider themselves to be educators. My regard for librarians is that of Roman Jakobson, who considered that a librarian is not a technician, but a mediator between sources of knowledge and those who use those sources. Somebody who will interpret a text, not merely tell you where it is.

I made Richard DeGennaro Professor of Bibliography at the University of

Pennsylvania so no one could say that he was not part of the faculty. I salute Harvard for making sure that the librarian is the second or third highest position among university professors. Librar- ians have historically occupied roles of

symbolic significance. But, unfortu-

nately, we have transformed them into

auxiliary technicians who are not central to the mission of the university. One of the things we must do is to elevate the status of the university librarian to a full member of the community of scholars.

Second, there is a gulf not between the sciences and technology, not between the social sciences and humanities, not between the sciences and the humanities, but between information, computer science departments, com-

puter centers, and our libraries. It is im-

portant to bridge that gap. We must

bring integration to this area. This is one reason that in our campaign for Brown we have pledged to raise $25 million in the next few years, provided the computer center and the library work together. For me, as a university president, their cooperation is essential if we are going to succeed in the twenty- first century. We cannot have the division and animosity that prevail in many institutions.

The library of the future is of great concern to me because the next step in the development of technology in libraries is to further integrate our basic information infrastructure of computing and communications within the university's traditional source of information resources and human information exper- tise-the library. For Brown University, it is crucial that information technology must be thoroughly integrated into the traditional mission of liberal learning and into the library.

If libraries are the DNA of our civilization, universities are "knowledge en-

gines," which use information as their fuel. The primary information resources of the university are in the library. With- out great libraries, there are no great universities, and we must strengthen the libraries. I, for one, do not think the book is going to disappear. It is a historical, cultural object. But there will be a peaceful coexistence between the book and electronic publications, and I hope this will be discussed during this conference.

University library directors must be committed to this vision, and I am de-

lighted that RLG and OCLC are collabo-

rating. Ownership does not matter any more, only access, because technology has democratized knowledge. My only concern in this domain is the federal

government because although, as tax-

payers, we have sponsored research, yet we are being charged for the telecommunications access to that research.

My other concern is that while we have a technology plan, we have no educa- tional plan in our universities. Technol-

ogy has not been included in curricular

planning. Technology is allowing us to

radically modify the space-time constants that link people together. But this signifi- cant component of the higher technol-

ogy revolution is not part of our educa- tional planning. Additionally, because the half-life of information is shrinking, learning strategies, rather than facts, should be mastered during the college years. We must train our students in how to analyze and deal with facts, to develop critical minds, and ask the right questions. As Mark Twain commented, after

telegraph service was established between the coasts, "Maine has contacted San Francisco, and Maine has nothing to

say to San Francisco." Technology is only a tool; what we do with it is important.

Gregorian, Technology, Scholarship and the Humanities 133



technology, scholarship, and the humanities: the implications of electronic information

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