[62] in Information Retrieval
Article of interest
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ganderso@Athena.MIT.EDU)
Fri Feb 7 09:50:07 1992
From: ganderso@Athena.MIT.EDU
To: libtalk@MIT.EDU
To: elibdev@MIT.EDU
To: bog-lib@MIT.EDU
To: ebarrett@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 07 Feb 92 09:47:46 EST
In cleaning out files, I found this article that I thought might
interest people. It was sent by John Waiblinger at USC where they
Have the Chronicle online. Also, Doug Greenberg was the keynote
speaker at the last CNI meeting.
Greg
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Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1991 14:43:00 PST
From: WAIBLING%USCVM.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu
Subject: USCInfo E-Mail <part 1 of 1>
To: Greg Anderson <GANDERSO@Athena.MIT.EDU>
- ------ User supplied note follows ------
From: John Waiblinger, University of Southern California
Most of you know that USC is prototyping an online version of the COHE.
I am emailing a copy of the full text of the point of view piece referred
to in Bernie's note.
- ------ USCInfo record(s) follow ------
Copyright 1991, The Chronicle of Higher Education, all rights reserved.
October 23, 1991 (Volume 38, Issue 09) pg. pov, 186 lines.
Opinion
Point of View
Information Access: Our Elitist System Must Be Reformed
WHEN I BEGAN GRADUATE SCHOOL in 1969, I did not know what a data
base was, I couldn't tell you the difference between hardware and
software, and a computer was a large machine in a glass-enclosed room
whose function I knew to be important to scientists and banks. I
certainly did not expect that I would ever use one or, for that
matter, that these electronic behemoths would ever have much
significance in the life of teaching and scholarship that I was then
beginning. My ignorance of computers was matched, however, by my
certainty that democratic values of inclusiveness could infuse and
enrich my chosen discipline of history.
Therefore, two years later when I began research for a doctoral
dissertation, I set out to understand the experience of ordinary
people who were neither great nor white nor male. Eventually, I
recovered traces of almost 6,000 citizens of the colony of New York
who had passed through the criminal-court system. Unfortunately, I
had also discovered that any generalizations I might want to make
about them would have to be expressed quantitatively since, for most
of them, I could recover only the most basic information.
From that point, my desire to democratize history led me
ineluctably to the esoteric world of the computer center: punched
cards, job-control language, data tapes, and a special foundation
grant to allow me to create a data base. Without the computer, any
individual's experience was historically trivial and
incomprehensible. With the computer, the experience of individuals
formed a collective pattern. Ironically, I required an expensive
tool that was not available to everyone in order to pursue my ideal
of democratized scholarship.
While we have done much to democratize the content of humanistic
scholarship, we have yet to do all that we should to broaden access
to that scholarship. The results of the new technology, in other
words, may be democratic in substance, but they are elitist with
respect to access.
We often hear today that our most serious scholarly problem is one
of excess -- there is too much information being produced too
expensively for too few users, and most of it isn't that important to
begin with. Like many truisms, this one is based upon an undeniable
fact: The amount of information being produced and published in this
country has grown exponentially. But in a more profound way, the
truism is false.
One person's excess is another's feast. For working scholars and
scientists, the information explosion does not necessarily look
excessive. It indicates the vitality of intellectual life in
American higher education and also indicates the development of
entirely new disciplines that did not exist 20 years ago, ranging
from molecular biology, materials science, and applied and
computational mathematics to women's studies, Afro-American studies,
and computation linguistics. New disciplines need new journals;
otherwise, how will scholars share their discoveries?
Seen from this angle, the excess is not an excess at all, but
merely evidence of healthy growth. Moreover, can we credit the
argument of so many university administrators that there is too much
information being produced and that they can't afford to purchase it
all for their faculties? Are these not the same people who busily
count articles, reviews, and books at tenure time and who inform the
earnest assistant professor that part of the job is to produce
information and publish it?
The real problem, at least in the humanities, is not excess but
access -- access to printed information, let alone access to existing
data bases. Many scholars will tell you that their greatest
difficulty is getting access to bibliographies of the journal
literature, never mind actually holding a given article in their
hands. In the humanities, we have only a few bibliographic tools
that are any good, notably the bibliographies produced by the Modern
Language Association. We have none that are generally affordable in
electronic form.
Who has access to what the librarians and critics of higher
education call an excess? First and foremost, scholars at major
research institutions, where the holdings of the libraries are large
and the cuts in journal subscriptions have been less disastrous. At
least in the humanities, document-delivery services are both
prohibitively expensive and still not adequate to the need, and
almost nothing that is worth having is available on-line or in
CD-ROM. Despite the growth of technological means for gaining access
to information, such tools remain relatively undeveloped, and most
scholars see them as a secondary means for acquiring the material
they need. Ownership of the print product is still what counts for
most scholars, and the more your institution owns, the better your
access. How ironic it is that even in this electronic age, access to
information should be so deeply undemocratic, despite the
democratically inspired character of so much of what humanities
scholars have produced in the last 20 years.
IN THIS ERA of democratized multicultural scholarship, who besides
leading scholars at leading research universities have access to the
"excess"? Scholars at neighboring institutions with
better-than-average interlibrary-loan arrangements do. Scholars at
more distant institutions do, if they can be patient about getting
the materials they need and can use interlibrary-loan services.
Independent scholars, many of them women, increasingly do not have
access. Scholars at less prosperous and isolated institutions, such
as the historically black colleges, do not.
Even in the hallowed halls of our greatest research universities,
access to electronic information and electronic sources of
information _about_ information is not an equally distributed
benefit. Some scholars have computers on their desks, provided by
their departments. A smaller number have computers that link their
users to the on-line card catalog; a still smaller number of scholars
have grants or institutional affiliations that give them access to
DIALOG, LEXIS, NEXIS, or WILSONLINE. Generally, scientists,
economists, engineers, lawyers, and doctors in universities have
benefited enormously from the new technology.
But most scholars in the humanities and social sciences, even at
the wealthiest institutions, use an older technology: the sneaker
network. They walk to the library, where they use pretty much the
same print tools that they used 20 years ago, except that now they
use both an on-line catalog, which is up to date but goes back only a
few years, and the old paper card catalog, which contains the rest of
the library's holdings. Only a few institutions have managed to do a
complete retrospective conversion of their card catalogs.
Today, even if your university or college no longer must own the
materials you need, it must help you get access to them and to
information about them, and access is invariably acquired through
expensive services that are unequally distributed both among
institutions and within them. Thus current technologies now provide
only limited access to a select group of high-prestige scholars in
high-prestige disciplines in high-prestige institutions.
BEYOND RESEARCH, most faculty members in the humanities depend on
libraries to give them access to the latest work in their disciplines
so that they can keep current courses up to date and devise new ones.
The faculty members with access to expensive technology to help them
search the literature can pass those benefits along to students more
quickly. Thus the elitist consequences of expensive technology pass
from the work of faculty members to the education of students.
What might be done to enhance access? Scholars at a small meeting
sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies identified
several possibilities. It would help if we had affordable on-line
bibliographies that included information about both current and past
periodicals, in a standardized format. Cooperative collecting of
periodicals and monographs by major research libraries, coupled with
a universal interlibrary-loan system, would also provide larger
numbers of scholars with ready access to current scholarship. Access
also would be improved if we had electronic, full-text versions
(either on CD-ROM or over networks) of the _existing_journal
literature.
All of these items are part of a system whose parts are closely
interrelated. We need to think about the methods and costs of
changing an entire system of information access and delivery, not
just about changing individual pieces of the system.
Part of the problem with developing better tools and expanding
access is money, but part of it also has been the unwillingness or
inability (I'm not sure which) of scholars, administrators,
librarians, and publishers to work cooperatively. The relevant
groups barely speak to each other in any systematic way. Scholars
have only themselves to blame if the available information tools and
information-access policies of their institutions do not suit their
needs. Too frequently scholars wait to complain until after the fact
rather than taking a role in developing the information-access and
retrieval systems at the beginning.
Users must weigh in with their own views. Do we need electronic
journals? Perhaps, but not nearly so much as we need better access
to the print journals that already exist, and certainly not as much
as we need the hardware and software that will allow _all_ potential
readers of such journals access, not just the fortunate few. Do we
even know, for example, what the trade-offs are between very powerful
technological tools for the few as against somewhat less powerful
tools for the many? Which should national groups be promoting? And
what steps should we be taking to insure the preservation of
electronic information so that our successors will not face the
electronic equivalent of the brittle books that are burning up inside
our libraries?
I know the answers are not easy. The issues are legion and
complex. I feel certain, however, that individual institutions
cannot address them properly. We must begin to solve them through
national cooperative efforts. Only then can we realize the
democratic promise that technology offers. If we fail to cooperate,
the result will be an even more elitist system of information access
and delivery than the print-oriented one that, willy-nilly, we are in
the process of dismantling.
_Douglas Greenberg is vice-president of the American Council of
Learned Societies._
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