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From Gateways to Knowledge: The Role of Academic “A Computer-based Harvard Red Book: [ Note: This paper is cast in the form of a memo from a university president to a newly-appointed curriculum committee.] The President's Charge to Dear Colleagues:
I thank you for undertaking the most difficult task a university faculty can confront, the periodic rethinking of its curriculum in the face of changing circumstances. To judge from past experience, your deliberations are likely to be long and, if not acrimonious, at least galvanized by profound conviction. To armor you against these perils, I have scheduled your meetings in the Regental Caucus Room, which has the most comfortable chairs on campus, and I have arranged for a complimentary open bar throughout your deliberations. I. Background In 1943, in the midst of World War II, President Conant of Harvard appointed a faculty committee to ponder “the objectives of a general education in a free society.” The committee's deliberations, which lasted nearly three years (a salutary warning, this), bore a more lasting fruit than such deliberations usually do. Their report, General Education in a Free Society, known more familiarly as the Harvard Red Book, has proved a landmark document in American higher education. The committee saw itself as inheriting an educational revolution in popular schooling. In moving from an agricultural to an industrial economy, America had increased its high school population ninetyfold. Mass public education had really begun. In 1945, when the committee issued its report, American higher education was about to institute a similar revolution; to welcome students of different kinds, and in much greater numbers, than it had ever before; to extend its curriculum into uncharted ground; and to expand its research task, and the financing thereof, in ways that would transform the institution. President Conant sensed the coming revolution when he charged the committee. “The primary concern of American education today,” he wrote, “is not the development of the appreciation of the 'good life' in young gentlemen born to the purple. It is the infusion of the liberal and humane tradition into our entire educational system. Our purpose is to cultivate in the largest possible number of our future citizens an appreciation of both the responsibilities and the benefits which come to them because they are Americans and are free.” (GE, xiv-xv) The Red Book makes interesting reading now, immersed as we are in the culture wars between the “Politically Correct Books” Left and the “Great Books” Right. More polite and judicious than we have been, perhaps, the Harvard committee wrestled with the same issues—an increasingly diverse student population, a proliferating and increasingly specialized curriculum, and the desire to teach sceptical and inquiring habits of mind and at the same time a commonly accepted body of information, all this without redeploying the rigid lockstep classical curriculum which Harvard had repudiated in the previous century. The recommendations the Committee made, I might note, differ hardly at all from the “distribution requirements” now in force on our campus. The mold struck by the Red Book lasted a good while. Now it is time to rethink the problem again. We face the third stage in the democratization of American education; now, we are expanding the educational franchise still further, to a yet more diverse student population; now, we must teach our students how to meet the higher, and different, demands for symbolic thought imposed by an information-based society. And a new force has now been added to the mix of social, political, and educational forces which animated the first two revolutions—digital technology. The digital revolution, and the information society it animates, alter all the terms in the carefully balanced educational equations the Harvard Committee worked out. I am asking you to develop a new Red Book for our university. II. Some fundamental questions to be addressed If I may quote from a recent faculty conference, I want you “to address the art of teaching, changes in the tools of instruction, societal changes, such as the increasing diversity in background and experience of those being taught, and questions concerning what must be taught and how to teach it.” I want you specially to consider how the most unprecedented of the changes we face—the digitization of information—affects all these topics. Perhaps the best way I can help focus your deliberations would be to put this request: Please consider our undergraduate curriculum as itself a small “information society.” How can we reconceptualize it in the same way that the larger society for which we educate our students is reinventing itself? Looking at the problem in this way, you may find that the university library will loom large in your deliberations. As you know, like most major universities these days, we are planning to close our library school and have put a draconian spending cap on our library budget. Even considering how short we are of money, have we done the wise thing here? 1. Now on to some of the particular questions that I hope you will consider. The first is, “What kind of literacy will our students need in the future?” They are growing up in a world which increasingly offers them information on an electronic screen rather than in a printed book. As the late O. B. Hardison, Jr. wrote in his last book:
What effects will this change bring? The goal of the printed text was fixity. That is what those great Renaissance scholars I used to study before I went into administration were after—fixity and the authority that comes from it. The volatile electronic text would seem to undermine that fixed authority. The electronic reader can now change the text being read, reformat it, reorder it, revise it, reprint it in another typeface in another place. Our students will be growing up with this freedom as their native way of reading. Doesn't this freedom undermine the whole idea of textual authority? There is a big fuss going on now about how the canonical Great Books are being replaced by modern revolutionary ones, but isn't this digital subversion really a much graver threat to cultural authority and continuity? And what effect will these habits of electronic “reading” have on the reading of traditional codex books? After all, our library has several million of those, and not all of them are printed on self-destructing acid paper. What will students brought up to read a volatile electronic text think about reading a fixed printed one? Won't it seem recalcitrant and rebarbitive? Won't they prefer what they can read, and thus manipulate, on screen? Won't they be accustomed to accessing “books” from a network rather than going to the library? If so, what do we do with all those books? Digitize them? Yet more money? And who will decide which ones to do first? Is this a library task or a faculty one? I'm far from an expert on what I gather is now called “multimedia” but what seems to be coming as the basic operating system for information is a richer sensory signal than black-and-white print provides, one that includes image and sound as well as print. Books have always had illustrations, of course, but now the whole world of imagistic expression is much more available, much easier and cheaper to reproduce, and as volatile and user-manipulatable as text. And sound too now forms a regular part of the expressive mixture. We can talk to our computers, have them read to us, play music, listen to, as well as read, an author. I'm only a university bureaucrat, but aren't we in for a whole new semiology of expression? The classic reading experience we cherish is built upon a black and white printed surface deliberately made as unnoticeable and unselfconscious as possible, so that we can concentrate on the conceptual world created by the words, rather than on the words themselves or their printed manifestation. This has been true, as the great Harvard Hellenist Eric Havelock pointed out, ever since the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet. Doesn't this transparency, and the silence and isolation which accompanied it, radically change when the expressive surface mixes words, images, and sounds, and does so in color? Look at one of the new media magazines, like Wired or Mondo 2000, that mimic computer design practices in print, and you'll see what I mean. If information will come in this new way, how are libraries going to store it and disseminate it? And how will they “translate” their books—as to some degree they will have to—into this new and richer mixed-media signal? If all this seems too much like an electronic game room, aren't we already beginning to use the same kind of mixture here on campus? We've just gotten a juicy NSF grant for our Scientific Visualization Group. Aren't those folks really doing the same thing, exploring a new interface between alphanumeric expression and iconic expression? And I've just been asked by a faculty group for seed money to start a Data Sonification Group, too, to add sound to help conceptualize various kinds of scientific data. Aren't we doing just what the computer-game world is doing? And what about the Interactive Fiction conference we just funded for the Creative Writing people? And of course we have had for two decades the pioneering Center for Electronic Music. And we have a funding request for a Center for the Digital Arts, as well. You all will know how resolutely I have defended and funded our Freshman Composition Program. But what will it look like in this universe? Will we continue to use the essay as the basic expressive training unit? If not, what will replace it? Who will teach this new literacy? What kind of faculty will we recruit to teach it? Could we think of the library, a digitally-based library, as the locus of this new kind of instruction? Would it emerge most obviously from the library's growing skills in designing informational packages? If so, are we to think of the library as performing a new kind of instructional role? If you add up all these mixed modalities, don't you get a fundamental change not only in how we learn but in what we learn? A change that will affect everything we teach and how we teach it? A different conception altogether of what human “literacy” is? If so, how do we teach it? Or should we, as our English Department wants to do, defend against it, as the end of the world? Won't that leave our students as the last clerks of a forgotten mode of apprehension? 2. The second question I'd like you to consider is this: “What happens to the idea of a “course” or a “class” in an environment of electronic information? One of the central threads discussed by previous committees like yours has been the fatal disconnection of one course from another. The student carries over little wisdom from one course to another, even within a single major. The very idea that some connection should occur between courses is discouraged by the finality of the final grade. Ah, the end of Shakespeare. Another great author to cross off my list? And, too, the “course” itself will vary widely depending on who teaches and who takes it. Suppose an enterprising instructor wanted to assemble an electronic sub-library for that particular course, one which included not only the texts studied in the class but those most closely associated with it, some secondary research materials and perhaps some of the primary ones which stood behind them? Wouldn't this improve the quality of the student writing in the course? As all of you know, at our university many of our students live off campus, often commuting long distances to be on campus only two or three days a week. These students have great difficulty using secondary sources, even if they are placed on library reserve in plentiful numbers. Suppose they could access the best articles on an assigned topic from home through their modem? Suppose the papers which they wrote, and perhaps the exams as well, were published on this class network, as I suppose we might call it? Might this kind of publication improve student writing in yet another way, by giving them a less artificial audience than the single instructor? I remember, when I was teaching, forever photocopying examples of good papers and exams as examples. Published electronically, such student excellence would be more naturally visible. If the network would allow it, might not the student essay might well become some kind of multimedia product? Once in a while, when someone asks me for an after-dinner talk, I puzzle about just what kind of work is going on at our institution. If I could call up the syllabus, the assignments given and executed, a student computer bulletin board about the course, I could get a much better idea of how instruction is shaping itself. And so could students who might be considering taking the course at a future time. And, if we project such a process as occurring year after year, wouldn't the “course” possess something which now it so markedly does not—a history? Do you think your colleagues would find this an intolerable intrusion on their teaching privacy? Or might they learn from what their colleagues across the university are doing? If one imagines a series of these courses connected hypertextually, might we not have here a new kind of answer to the central question of your committee—the search for some kind of common ground, of general education? Such a series of connections might, at first, be planned. But it would soon become a series of stochastic encounters, using the initial connections to devise new ones based on interest and the kind of chance which favors the prepared mind. Such a digital sub-library would, of course, present itself as a possible resource for high school students who aspired to advanced placement, or just to independent study. The next step beyond that, and of course it is already being done, is to prepare a course for use in distance learning of various kinds. Such a digital “course library” would open our courses to all kinds of groups now excluded from them. I can see three problems, at least, in such a reinvented “course.” First, it would cost a good deal of time and money to set up. But could not those costs be offset by reduced textbook costs, by fees by those who access it from the outside, and by the savings in duplication and dissemination of the basic and secondary course materials? Another possible economy in this regard is student productivity. I know that you may shy away from the very word, but we all know that our university is under great pressure to maximize the student's learning while here, and to keep the baccalaureate degree down to four years. Students themselves are under terrific pressure to maximize their very expensive undergraduate educational time. I am sure that our new survey of student employment opened your eyes as much as it did mine; our undergraduates work an average of 25 hours a week at an outside job! We have scarcely begun to ponder this question of student “productivity,” yet increased costs of all kinds, tuition not the least, force us to. At present, a gigantic amount of waste is built into how students enter courses, often stay only half a term, drop, resume, buy books they don't need, can't get ones they do need, and so on. We seldom think of how we might improve this segment of the curricular “information society.” The second problem I can see looming is this: who would create such a system and how might it be done? Clearly it stands outside the capacity of an individual faculty member. Could the department do it? To some extent, yes, as the Intermedia program at Brown has shown. But the regular building of such a sub-library will have to lie outside a professor's regular scholarly and teaching obligations, or it would simply swamp them. Would such a task be, then, a function of the library? If so, how might we equip the library to perform it? Whoever did this kind of design would be performing not an ancillary service but a central evaluative and judgmental one, a primary teaching task. It would be a new task, and require a new kind of training. Third, it seems likely that such a system would gravely aggravate a problem which already vexes us—plagiarism. I need not spell out the fresh problems such a system would create. But might we not turn this to our advantage? The nature of authorship and originality is one of the issues which changes most radically as we move from print to screen. The absolute originality which the Romantic tradition of authorship bequeathed to us, and which current intellectual property litigation is doing so much to set in concrete, directly contradicts a central characteristic of digital information—its iterability, its ability to replicate itself. That is why copyright issues loom so large on our campus. In a world like that of electronic text, which collapses the reader/writer distinction, the very idea of individual creation is now up for renegotiation. Why not use this new kind of course to discuss it? Every time I talk to a business group, someone asks me why we do not train our students for the kind of collaborative creative work they will be doing later in groups. Might we not begin such work here, à propos a discussion of original creation and intellectual property in a digital environment? 3. The third question I would like you to consider: What happens to the idea of a classroom in a computer-based environment? I'm familiar with the first level of changes, of course. You all are barraging the administration with requests for money to install multimedia apparatus in class, as well as to set up networked computer classrooms. One of the proposals I reviewed included a description of a fascinating new program which supports complete interchange of information among students about particular assignments. What does this make of the classroom? A series of smaller work groups? How should the room be arranged? How, for the matter of that, do you teach in such a room? But these are really first level problems. The deeper level I wish you to consider is both more futuristic and more immediately rooted in the present. The logic of current work in what is called “virtual reality” suggests that perhaps we may build a single “classroom” out of many different distant locations blended by digital magic into one. Much of the “ubiquitous computing” work done at, for example, Xerox PARC seems to point in the same direction. Will the naturally disembodied nature of electronic information mean that we don't need classrooms at all? Or, as I would guess and hope, will the need for human society prevail? Such issues may sound a little far-fetched but I have on my desk now the legislature's proposal to axe two of our projected classroom buildings. How hard should I fight back? And who will plan these new instructional spaces, however “virtual”? The administration? The individual departments? Or, again, the library which plans the information system of which they will be a part? If the library designs and administers an instructional network for a course, will it come in time to administer a “virtual classroom” as well? Again, please consider issues of faculty and student productivity and costs. Surely here the labor-intensivity of individual classroom instruction can be addressed; we must get some electronic leverage on it somehow. 4. Question four: “What will a 'textbook' look like in the new digital environment? Who will 'publish' it? Who will pay for it and how? Committees like yours have not, to my knowledge, considered textbooks to be part of curricular planning. But some of my earlier questions suggest that the issue will become a central one. If we are concerned with improving student “productivity” (the ratio, I suppose one might define it, of student learning to student costs), we have to consider how much student texts cost and how much benefit students obtain from them. We might also consider whether the university should provide them, in a form customized to our instruction, rather than depending on outside publishers. Even the print publishers, as slow as can be in adapting to digital textuality, are now making their texts available in customizable form—licensing end-users to take parts from one text, parts from another. And I'm sure all of you use the custom anthologies that campus copy shops prepare. Perhaps the university should buy in bulk, as it were, and then customize for our students. The technology hasn't reached a focus-point yet, but it seems clearly headed to some kind of genuinely portable digital reading and writing device, and to a storage medium of extraordinary capacity. In a real sense, individual students will carry around their own miniaturized library. Your committee might explore whether our library people are thinking about this miniaturization of their function. Is this part of their thinking about gateways, for example? Such a distribution system inevitably makes the library into a publisher, but would that be a bad thing? After all, the talk of the town is convergence: the entertainment business converging with the publishing business converging with the computer business. Why should the university be exempt from these kinds of technological pressures? The “class” network I've described would be, of course, another way to “publish” customized texts. Costs again. I wonder how they would compare to the present procedure of bookstore ordering, reordering, returning, etc. I remember this from my teaching days as a perennial nightmare. Perhaps your committee might inquire into net-cost-to-student in the present system as against a digital one. Maybe a trial run in one department or a big class that fulfills one of our General Education requirements. Judging from our campus computer store, the kind of computer both our students and our faculty now buy includes a CD-ROM player. Might we think of publishing custom “textbook” CD-ROM disks for our students? The technology for this is now much cheaper and easier than even a couple of years ago. I don't think we can depend on the print publishers to solve these textbook problems, as we have in the past. In the first place, of course, we are thinking of student productivity and cost containment and they are thinking about profit maximization. But more than that, outside publishers cannot be expected to consider our curriculum as a single integrated information system, and that surely is the direction in which we want to go. The whole logic and direction of “publishing” changes in such a system. And speaking of publishing, if I add munchies to your open bar, would you consider the place of our University Press in all this? It has lost money for years, of course, and we really are going to pull its subsidy soon. Last year, when I fired the Director, I threatened to shut it down entirely, but backtracked and appointed a faculty committee which has not, more's the pity, succeeded in changing the financial picture an iota. Isn't there some way that the Press could create a campus digital publishing service? The CD-ROM technology offers the Press, and the library, an extraordinary opportunity for (to use perhaps too commercial a term) “re-packaging,” reconfiguring information from “book-length” to some larger “mini-library” integer. Could the library and the Press work together on such a publication scheme? More broadly, isn't there some way that they could combine the Press's publication functions with the lending functions of the library? There would be, of course, a prickly clash of institutional cultures, but such mergers are occurring all across the American spectrum, wherever digital technology has transformed it. Maybe it is our turn. The system of academic publishing we have now, where our faculty produces information, gives it to publishers, usually for a song, so that they can publish expensive books in ever-smaller lots which libraries can no longer afford to buy because they are spending all their money buying journals which obtain their material for free from our professors, who urge me to give the library more money, and the Press more money, to continue this self-bankrupting process…. Well, frankly, it will have to stop soon. Textbooks are part of a campus information system of which the library is a part, the Press is a part, and the campus bookstore is a part. Doesn't digital technology suggest that there may be a better way to orchestrate these parts? Textbooks (the word itself is, of course, an anachronism), in a digital world, are a fundamental part of the curriculum problem. They always were, of course—think of the changes brought about by the paperback. But why did the university—I don't believe I've ever heard this question asked—wait for somebody else to invent the paperback, if it was to mean so much to how we taught? So here. All those custom anthologies are being driven by internal pressures for curricular change; the custom anthology itself models an emergent curriculum struggling against a recalcitrant medium. In this current revolution in expressive technology, why can't the university lead rather than follow? 5. Having already gotten myself into enough hot water to fill a king-size Jacuzzi, let me segué to another question: How will the digitization of information affect the basic organizational unit of our undergraduate curriculum, the “major”? Let me show you the direction of my inquiry with an illustration from my own academic field, literature. In an digital universe, the arts that use words, those that use sounds, and those that use images, now share a common notational base. The union is tighter even than that because it is data-driven. I can create a song from your picture, a directly-data-driven visual image from your poem. The separation of the arts does not inhere in nature; they have always drawn as close together as they could. It is the expressive medium which has kept them apart. In a digital world, that barrier no longer obtains and they surely will, as John Cage said in one of his stimulating lectures here on campus, all return to some kind of operatic center. We see this already in the popular arts, and the learned ones—always, as we know, in the vanguard—will surely follow suit. MTV is the most notorious such new mix, but the multimedia programming now emerging offers countless instances. If you want to see a brilliant example, look at my friend Prof. Robert Winter's new “program” of the Dvorak “New World” symphony which will appear this Christmas. In the world of the sciences, about which I am not really qualified to speak, surely the same thing is happening in the “visualization” and “sonification” spheres. What will such convergence do to the undergraduate major? To the relationship between majors, at least in the arts and letters? Doesn't the “major,” seen in this new light, seem to be based on a particular technological medium—print—which is now metamorphosing into something else? The major, of course, reflects a larger organization, the department and the discipline it embodies. Surely these will change—change or pickle themselves in non-strategic resistance. The department constitutes the basic building block of the university. Suppose digital technology forces it to change? Neither the department and discipline nor the major have always resided on Mt. Olympus. They are not eternal. The whole modern cluster of specializations isn't much more than a century old. When they dissolve—when, not if—what will take their place as a central organizational principle? Who, or what, will supply new principles of order? The question runs deep into the charge of your committee—general education. At present, all campus voices are disciplinary. The “cross-disciplinary” ones really only transpose the melody an octave upward, fissionate into a hybrid which is itself disciplinary. Any jobs which aren't, mine for example, is immediately dismissed as “bureaucratic.” Yet everything in the digital revolution, everything in my charge to you, moves in the other direction, toward some trans-disciplinary voice. Where will it come from? Let me now, speaking again as a bureaucrat, a disciplinary outsider, ask you to think about a very iffy proposition: could it be that, in a digital world, the lower division of the undergraduate curriculum may change places with the upper? Change, at least, relative significance, reverse their present figure/ground relationship? Isn't the innate logic of the common digital base, at least for the arts and letters, relational rather than specialized? Doesn't that indicate that a very profound reversal will take place? Let me try to explain. The “General Education” problem was created by disciplinary specialization and the disciplinary “major” which followed it. Once you define the “real” university education as a concentration in a specialized subject, the preparation for this specialization becomes secondary. But the first two years provide the only possible place for some kind of “general education” to balance the specialized education to come. So the lower division has become a battleground between “gen ed” requirements and “major” requirements. For the undergraduate it seems only a miscellaneous collection of hurdles obstructing the specialized nirvana of choice. That is where we are now. The digitization of information, however, changes fundamentally the relationship of the disciplines. To revert again to the world of arts and letters from which I come, doesn't a common digital base for art, music, and literature, and a common expressive mode—digital multimedia rather than the codex book—mean that the disciplinary separations we are accustomed to will dissolve? And the departmental structure upon which they are based as well? If one looks at the new digitally-based art forms now emerging, music videos, interactive fictions, interactive digital films, museum displays, motion-based theme park rides, the multimedia “editions” of Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky pieces which Robert Winter has done for the Voyager Company, the new Voyager CD-ROM edition of Macbeth—they all mix words, sounds, and images in new ways. None of them fit into current disciplinary and departmental structures. Our students will feel the power of this new center even if we do not. Where will they find it in the university curriculum? Might it not find a home in the non-specialized part rather than in the major? I really am not qualified to speak about the sciences, but I wonder if a similar convergence is not taking place there. The felt center of education may, in the future, lie not in hierarchical disciplinary orders but in some kind of hypertextual interconnection. The most obvious analogy I can think of is that between distributed computing and single-processor computing; maybe the current management debate between top-down and bottom-up management embodies the same distinction. If anything like this happens, then the center of gravity of the undergraduate curriculum is going to reverse itself. It will be the non-disciplinary curriculum which will constitute the felt center of experience. If so, might we find that “general education” is emerging once again but through a technological door rather than a conceptual one? If, for a moment, you will allow yourselves to contemplate such a reversal, to think of a curricular coherence established by a digital network of interlocking informational bases, would you not have a really new way to think about “general education” itself? It has always sought coherence in a central body of knowledge and in a common curriculum pursued in a lock-step fashion. It has always defined itself in opposition to specialization. But as Alfred North Whitehead (another Harvard type) made clear long ago, education always strives for an oscillation between these two poles. The general education debate has always been about how, somehow, anyhow, we can orchestrate this oscillation. Hasn't the nature of digital information offered us a new, and much better, way to do this? Such a discussion carries us into deep waters, but before I return to shore, let me make one more suggestion. I've just bet a lot of university money on a new emergent field of inquiry called “artificial life.” It deals, in as much as I have been given to understand it, with the digital replication of evolutionary growth, but in silicon rather than in carbon, as life on earth has up to now been. It also seems to be working on a new, evolutionary way of thinking itself, a genuine alternative to “top down” propositional planning and thought. Solutions are not imposed, or even arrived at through the “Eureka” method, but allowed to evolve from a small group of variables. Might we look there for wisdom in how to “plan by not planning” a new digitally-based curriculum? For stochastic guidance in letting a new series of curricular foci evolve? Would this be a really new way to think of the “general” part of “general education”? 6. Now one last question: What role will the library play in this new curriculum? How, in fact, should it constitute a “gateway,” to the informational world in its charge? Let me, if I may, suggest how you might think about a new curriculum and a new library within the same intellectual frame. Considered on the largest scale, the undergraduate curriculum is an attention-structure. It allocates a scarce commodity—student attention—in what we hope is an optimal way. The real subject of that “Gateways” conference the library has just sponsored, to which I contributed my usual post-prandial avuncular chuckle, pondered the same thing, didn't it? Isn't a “gateway” an attempt to allocate scarce student attention in an optimal way? In an industrial society, the scarce resources are goods and services. In an information society, the scarce commodity is not information—we are choking on that—but the human attention required to make sense of it. Human attention-structures work differently from goods and services and will require a new kind of economics and a new kind of economist. The economists have not realized this yet, but then neither have the rest of us. If, in a digitally-based information society, a library no longer just collects books but constructs a particular set of attention-structures, gateways to information, will not the librarian and, to personify the problem, the library, be one of these new “economists”? Libraries have always been in the information business, of course. In the industrial world, though, information came in the form of physical, manufactured, units—books, reports, journals—and thus fit nicely into the dominant quantitive pattern of an industrial society. To see how well you were doing, you need only count your units. If, in such an economy, the person with the most toys wins, by the same logic the library with the most books is the best. Great libraries were made primarily by great collections—of units. Dispensing these units to the end-users was a secondary, if often complex, task. I do not mean by this that librarians did not take this task seriously; quite the contrary. The skill and care of reference librarians has always constituted, to my mind, the most dependable excellence in university life. Bibliographers have tried with great skill to anticipate demands in burgeoning fields. But—I speak as an outsider here, and under correction—has not the library been basically a dispenser of information as required, an information service? Its aim was always to have what the user required. In a digitized information society, don't these primary and secondary functions change places? Digitized information is immanent, not physically placed, and, unlike the book, can be given away and kept at the same time. In a world of data-bases, the library with the most units no longer wins. At the same time, the dispensing of information, the new economics of human attention, becomes central. In an information-rich world where human attention is the scarce commodity, the library's business is orchestrating human attention-structures. This is an active, not a passive, function. The design of library shelves has never lent itself to much variation. The design of human attention-structures demands a great deal of it. Essential choices are involved about what is important and what is not. “Architects of great skill” (if I may borrow a phrase from an eloquent Council on Library Resources pamphlet of several years ago) will be required for this kind of design. And architects with a new kind of training. Where will they come from? Efficient use of time was not so important under the old regime. Leisure was, in fact, supposed to be the trademark of the university world; efficiency came from the sordid world of commerce. No one thought of faculty time in terms of “productivity” (a convention which, of course, we still observe in university meetings). And certainly no one thought of student productivity at all. The great pastoral illusion moved in just the opposite way—a student wandering lost but enrapt in the library stacks of learning. All of that has changed, and will change much more under the twin pressures of financial dearth and information glut. And so the library begins to reinvent itself around the metaphor of the “gateway.” It seems to me, at least, that this gateway must an active, imaginative creation, one integrally related to the processes of instruction in a fundamentally different way from a collection of books awaiting the student's call slip. The new economics of human attention works very differently from the old economics of book purchase and loan. I've suggested that the digital curriculum will require profound systems-designers, not narrow computer jocks but people aware of the whole intellectual landscape. Someone will have to teach navigational skills of a high order to the students. Someone will have to create digital networks of student information and publication. Someone will have to reconfigure knowledge from book-length packets into new forms. Who will perform all these tasks? Create, manage, an undergraduate “publishing” universe? Whoever does this will play a central, not a peripheral or support, role in our new undergraduate curriculum, whatever it looks like. The central informational task in a digital expressive universe—and a fortiori—in a world where print and electronic materials must work together, is no longer strictly an indexical storage and dissemination task but something quite different. Is there any pattern for how this new task might be undertaken, or for the library's role in it, in the current convergence of commercial media companies and services? A recent newspaper article divided the current merger-prone communications enterprises into three basic areas:
Will a similar convergence happen within the university? If so, we should be thinking about the organizations on our campus which logically might converge in the same way. I have suggested two: the library and the university press; are their others? Might they together be reincarnated into a new organizational form, one which we might call a “library,” but which would in truth be a new kind of organization? If so, we will need to train people to run it and we must train them somewhere. Now that we have abolished the library school, where should that be? III. Conclusion It is some task I have laid upon you. But it is a crucial one. We in the administration have been diligent firefighters in trying to extinguish the current fiscal fires, deploying our water buckets with whatever dispatch a cantankerous faculty permits. But all of these efforts are piecemeal responses to much stronger forces, both technological and financial. These same pressures have fundamentally altered every large corporate enterprise in America that is not a protected monopoly. Our turn is next. There is no point in objecting that “we are not a business.” We are. The proper reply is to ponder these forces, and the changes they will bring, in a properly academic context. The context I have asked you to consider is the undergraduate instructional one, and of course there are others—graduate and professional instruction, and the whole domain of organized research. But if we are an educational institution, the final context in which we consider change must be the curriculum, what we teach, how we teach it, and to whom. It would be Presidential Pomposity at its worst to pretend that I can see what educational patterns will realize themselves in the changing circumstances which I'm asking you to ponder. But I have, I hope, sketched an agenda of needs and possibilities which inhere not in my view of the world but in the modern digital world itself. If I have imposed my own views in any way on the charge, perhaps it has been in my feeling that the library may be the place where many items on the agenda should be addressed. That would require a great change in institutional culture and of course a lot of money. But perhaps I'm wrong about this. Please report back before the sun cools down. And please remember that general education, the student's whole educational experience through time, is the screen upon which we must project all our designs and hopes. |