[695] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Re: Librarians and the INTERNET
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael S. Hart)
Wed Jul 8 09:31:30 1992
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 1992 08:25:15 CDT
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L%UHUPVM1.BITNET@ricevm1.rice.edu>
From: "Michael S. Hart" <HART@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list PACS-L <PACS-L%UHUPVM1.BITNET@ricevm1.rice.edu>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
OK, PACS people. . .I have just spent an hour trying to whittle
the quotes from the previous note down to a manageable size,
and FAILED, by netiquette standards, even though I have Blue
Penciled my brains out and used some quote once where they
previously appeared twice, hoping the reference would stick.
(Pencil. . .wasn't that an early brand of word-processor?
Blue Pencil. . .must have been for early IBM machines.)
Subject: Re: Librarians and the INTERNET
Answers to the DIGESTed PACS posting of notes from:
Susanne Kendler, Charles Blair (Lee Jaffee), Deb Lamb-Deans,
mulliner@ouvaxa.ucls.ohiou.edu, [quoting Bob Strauss
(STRAUSS@UNCA.BITNET) ], and Jennifer Heise.
Quotes start with "***" Replies start with "*** reply"
***
Jennifer Heise:
"Ok. I'll bite. Who's going to pay for this? And who is going to
be willing to distribute their information this way? Obviously
not government, which is going out of the information and
education businesses altogether, preferring to provide subsidies
for megabusinesses and "senior citizen" terrorists.
(bitterness mine, all mine... after all, a conservative,
uneducated populace is the incumbent's best friend...)"
*** reply
The volunteers of Project Gutenberg are going to pay for it,
at least they have been for the past 21 years. These are an
electronic association of people around the world who create
and distribute electronic texts free of charge and copyright
throughout the Internet, Bitnet, and various email and BBSs.
Their goal is to provide 10,000 of the most used volumes (in
English, so far, but now scheduled for simultaneous releases
of Jules Verne's and Victor Hugo's classics in French). The
Project is currently releasing 2 etexts per month and PACS-L
is hereby the first to hear that the July etexts will be The
War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells.
Project Gutenberg has also released an ASCII version of "Zen
and the Art of the Internet" which was mentioned in the note
to which this replies. We are also working on an "A Child's
Garden of the Internet" which should be even simpler to use,
and should be easily updated once a week. You who have this
knowledge and are willing to share it, please contact us for
getting your contributions included. You get fame and glory
but probably no money.
***
Charles Blair, "Lee Jaffe wants to withdraw the expression,
`drinking from a firehose.'"
*** reply
First of all. . ."Drinking From a Firehose" is no more apt a
quotation for electronic information than it is for anything
found in libraries for the past hundred years. No one might
be expected to read everything in a library. . .yet it is no
quotation expected to be applied to libraries. Just as user
patrons in libraries have to browse the catalogs, ask a user
friendly librarian or two for help, or even try a few others
in their repertoire of libraries. . .so too does the user of
the networks. None of you were born knowing how to use this
network any more than you were born knowing how to use paper
oriented libraries. None of you were born knowing how to do
email, sub to listservs, either. No one is forcing anyone a
supercalifragalisticexpialadocious drink from the firehose--
any more than you are forced to accept voltage from sockets,
appliances and other electric gizmos in your lives. It will
just lie there until you ask for it, and it won't shock your
nerves as much as electricity will.
". . .to _manage_ not only the amount of information, but also
the number of places in which it might be found, something I need
to do now -- this is not trivial."
***reply
This is not going to be much of an issue in the future. The
libraries of the future will eventually be more compatible--
just as computers have become, as hi-fi's before than, as an
assortment of telephone systems before that, as the railroad
gauges before that, mass production before that, as printing
with moveable type before that, and Carolingian Miniscule as
far back as Charlemagne, and the Roman and Greek system, and
the Egyptians, the Library at Alexandria before that. . . .
As information is created in the Public Domain, or even wait
a while and the commercial providers will too, compatibility
will increase. Most of you probably don't remember when the
records for sale were made for certain brands of players and
that Standard Oil was named because it only worked in "Brand
Name Standard" burners (which were anything but standard, as
they would only burn Standard Oil). But many of you DO have
a memory of why IBM compatibles became the standard for much
of the world of computing. . .because any company could make
parts that would work in them. Same things will eventually,
hopefully sooner than later, happen with etext.
Of course, you can make your own library by downloading what
you want and saving it locally. Since it costs only nickels
to store books the size of Alice in Wonderland, it hardly is
feasibly NOT to download it in our location, since the price
of a phone call is more than a nickel (if you are pretending
your connection is free, then you also have to pretend to up
your ante by a nickel). 1.44M floppies are only $.50, so an
etext of Alice at 150K, costs about a nickel. Of course the
cost is falling by about 33% per year.
"Something as wonderful as Zen and the Art of the Internet is
really only a primer for getting started; it's a user's
manual, or owner's manual, as if I were just handed the keys to
an 18-wheeler with split-shifting, and had to figure out how to
drive it. But it's not the same as taking that or any vehicle to
every city with a four-star French restaurant and bringing back
their menus. That involves managing a _changing_ landscape, not
to mention the vehicle itself (some bridges are too low, some
roads too narrow, etc. etc.)."
"In short, the world of information is not static. It is
ballooning. Librarians of the future cannot manage it alone. More
and more, I think, they'll need good automated tools to help
them. Those of us in library automation need to think about,
design, and build those tools. This is the challenge."
*** reply
This is the goal of "A Child's Garden of the Internet" and I
hope you will all make contributions as you learn more about
the networks (not just the internet) including failed trials
at doing something, as well as success stories.
***
mulliner@ouvaxa.ucls.ohiou.edu,
" Bob Strauss (STRAUSS@UNCA.BITNET) wrote:
All this talk about 'what value the internet.' I forsee an
electronic Library wherein EVERYONE will have access to a
Library of Congress size collection. In 50 years, people will
wonder "how did they ever do meaningful research in the 1980s
and 1990s in those tiny libraries?" Researchers will download
pieces of information (quanta?) and ignore the bulk, which
wont interest them--rather than go through tons of items,
looking for a few gems of wisdom.
*** reply
Actually, my prediction is that the amount of information an
ordinary computer will be able to handle in 50 years will be
so great that there will be no need to download "quanta" but
rather that each computer will be able to hold so much data,
and search it so fast, that there will be little need for an
exhaustive thought patter on the part of the searcher. With
multi-tasking, the searcher will be able to start a search a
"brute force" program can do, and then think up some others,
run them, too, with higher orders of cpu priorites, and thus
learn which strategies run the fastest. Just for fun I have
the idea of using Norton's to search a half gig of stuff for
a test. . .ok, so my little homemade antique 486 is not fast
. . .it took a little under 20 minutes to search 512M total,
including directory information, between file space, etc. A
search program like GREP would do it much faster, and should
be able to search only .txt files, etc. . .BUT. . .given you
have half a gig of real text, you COULD do a brute force get
anything search in 20 minutes, or perhaps 10 minutes with an
Intel 50MHz board. Of course, our test 586 should do a disk
like this one in under 5 minutes, the 686 in under 2 minutes
and the 786, which should be on the market by the time these
10,000 etexts are all available, should be able to search an
etext library of all 10,000 books in (let's see, 1G a minute
for 10,000 etexts of say X00k each, would only be) X minutes
for a brute force search for something that wasn't there, or
something that searched all files. So. . .if the etexts are
an average to 200k, then in will take 2 minutes to search an
entire 10,000 etext library; 300k = 3mins, 500k = 5mins. As
examples: Alice in Wonderland, Looking-Glass, Peter Pan and
the Scarlet Letter average less than any of these. (As do an
average of the Shakespeare plays and the larger books of the
Bible.)
***
This reminds me of my favorite citation from one of my
favorite books:
"'Think about it, man' said a young enthusiast at the San
Francisco home computer fair last year, 'you could have
the entire library of Congress at your fingertips.'
'What would you do if you had the entire Library of
Congress at your fingertips?' I asked him.
I am still waiting for an answer.
Jacques Vallee, THE NETWORK REVOLUTION: CONFESSIONS OF A
COMPUTER SCIENTIST (Berkeley: And/Or Press, Inc., 1982),
p. 172."
*** reply
Anyone who is still waiting for an answer to such a question
has obviously asked it of the wrong person. . .they are gone
. . .either using the electronic libraries. . .or just gone.
***
Susanne Kendler, "I learnt how to cruise the Internet
in exactly the small steps Lee Jaffe previously described."
*** reply
The whole purpose of Project Gutenberg is to turn these baby
steps into giant steps, both in terms of text studies and on
the networks.
***
"I found that the only computing-specialist of our Department
still works with MS-DOS 3.0."
*** reply
Many of the DOS gurus, including those at IBM, still use 3.x
(which is what your specialist may have meant. I myself, am
still using 3.3, which is still the most bug free version.)
(I have 4.x and 5.x, and OS/2, etc, but 3.3 is the choice.)
***
Deb Lamb-Deans, "They are not Luddities in my opinion, they are
overworked and underpaid academic/public librarians. Many of
them deal with more than one system now (OCLC, opacs, CD-ROM's,
online searching) and the thought of adding another to the pile
is somewhat discouraging! Add this feeling to a general lack of
support to take the time to learn a new resource and the lack of
training, and I can see why people fight the addition of yet
another task to their job jars."
*** reply
As the competing systems settle on various search systems, a
librarian or patron will eventually have to learn fewer, and
fewer, and fewer systems. . .just as nearly all pieces of hi
if equipment now fit together in the same wiring systems (as
an example. . .the wires 99% of US systems use are RCA cable
standards, and 99% of the rest are DIN). However, go back a
few decades and you would have to custom make the connectors
to wire the pieces together if you didn't buy all one brand.
***
"But lets have some small amount of sympathy for those who seem
reluctant to embrace this."
*** reply
You (plural) have all the sympathy in the world.
=====================================================
Thank you for your interest,
Michael S. Hart, Professor of Electronic Text
Executive Director of Project Gutenberg Etext
Illinois Benedictine College, Lisle, IL 60532
No official connection to U of Illinois--UIUC
