The Future Impact of the World Wide Web |
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Copyright © Walt Crawford,
"Digital Reality II," Boston, MA, 6/5/2000
The title I've been assigned is about the future. But I'm not a prophet. I qualify as a professional futurist, since I've been paid more than once to speak or write about the future: those are the only qualifications for being a futurist, as far as I can tell. But I'm not a prophet or a visionary, and I think that deserves a little discussion.
Until fairly recently, I felt a little guilty about dissecting and demolishing past and present dreams of simplistic futures: after all, where was my own superior vision? I've been reading a number of books about the future-specifically those written at least five years ago, always good for a laugh and for evaluating the current claims of high-profile visionaries. The track records of most pundits and futurists have been pretty awful. But pundits and futurists continue to make equally flawed predictions and projections, and keep getting paid handsomely for those predictions. Futurists and trendspotters have learned something critical to their trade: there are no penalties for being wrong, as long as you're interesting.
One of the books I picked up began with a thoughtful discussion of the dangers of futurism. We can't know the future. Futurists (myself included) proceed either by extrapolating from simplified versions of the present or by telling us what they want to see happen. This author's point was that future visions are, by and large, designed to get us to ignore the present and focus our energies on the "inevitable" path laid out in the vision. To the extent that we live in the future, we miss the richness of the present and reduce our possibilities for the future.
I won't mention the book's title or author because, as it turns out, the author was a hypocrite. He really meant that we should ignore all futurists except for the ones he favors, namely the neosocialists, anti-everythings, and other negativist charmers such as Jeremy Rifkin. Whose track records are, of course, no better than those of George Gilder and Faith Popcorn-but they're wrong on the side this author favors. Such is life.
I came away from that book thinking that I'm right to disclaim specific visions of the future. This speech will focus on aspects of the future that I would prefer to see, which naturally means that I think those trends are probable. Not inevitable, to be sure: inevitable is one of those words that puts my back up.
My belief is that life tends toward more choices rather than fewer. Additionally, I believe that technological change is neither smooth, nor inevitable, nor fully predictable, and that people don't change as rapidly as technology-and that it's people who count. I began using the slogan "And, not or" more than a decade ago; I now couple it with the claim that the best answer to most multiple-choice questions is "Yes."
Some of you may already assume that I'm a Luddite who just doesn't understand technology or the Web, and others of you may conclude that during this speech. You're free to do so. I do note that the Luddites were right, although in a losing cause. But I would also note that I make my living as an information architect at RLG-a job title that really didn't exist prior to the Web. My primary roles are as service manager for Eureka, RLG's Web-based end-user search service, and as lead designer and analyst for Eureka's user interface. My entire adult life has been spent using computers to improve library services-and, although we still have a non-Web version of Eureka, we're doing our best to get rid of it.
In mentioning Eureka, I think it's worth noting our own experience with predictability and change. Toward the end of the 1980s, a new standard emerged that seemed destined to establish the future of end-user searching interfaces. Z39.50 was adopted in 1988; the standard made it feasible for computers to query other computers in a standardized way, retrieving data in flexible standardized form.
By the mid-1990s, the general assumption was that most bibliographic access would use Z39.50. Each campus would build its own ideal user interface as part of its own Z39.50 client, using that client not only for its online catalog but for any bibliographic searching. It was incumbent on nonprofit and commercial search systems to build robust Z39.50 servers; otherwise, we'd be out of business.
RLG was there early on-the organization has always been a leading proponent of standards. Zephyr, RLG's Z39.50 server, was probably the earliest robust production-quality Z39.50 server in the United States (and possibly the world); we know from server logs that most Z39.50 clients (including most online catalog vendors and other bibliographic networks) used Zephyr as a reliable testbed.
The expected dominance of Z39.50 searching had odd effects on RLG's development of search systems. We developed Eureka in 1992 as a telnet-based search system. It was developed as an internal Z39.50 client talking to Zephyr-and the assumption was that most users would eventually migrate to their own Z39.50 clients. As the Web emerged, and the Eureka team realized the usefulness of a Web version, it was difficult to get internal attention: wasn't everyone using (or going to use) Zephyr?
The last two years have seen a significant change-and it's a change that came about for complex reasons. First, Web access has made users and librarians comfortable with having widely-varied interfaces within the overall browser environment. Second, very few academic libraries still do much in-house user interface development; most colleges and universities now use commercial online catalogs and do limited customization. Those two trends combine to override the earlier trend that libraries wanted one uniform interface for all resources. Now, they want the best interface for any given resource-and they generally don't want to build it.
As a result, we can demonstrate that most end-user searching now takes place through Web-based Eureka (which is also a Z39.50 Zephyr client), not Z39.50 to other clients. That makes it more important to keep improving Eureka on the Web.
Based on the common knowledge of 1990 or 1992, Eureka would now be starting to disappear, along with the Web version of FirstSearch and other national Web interfaces; local Z39.50 clients would have taken over. But times have changed. Well-designed external Web versions are back in vogue.
The moral to this particular story is that times change, not always in predictable ways. Academic libraries need to track change and deal with it, but dealing with it does not mean making long-range plans and sticking blindly to them. It means accepting complexity, appreciating change, and maintaining creative flexibility.
NELINET asked me to speak about the future impact of the World Wide Web on libraries and archives. I'll address that by offering three different broad scenarios: the Web as life, the Web as CB radio, and the Web as one piece of a complex whole. You could also call these the dystopian or "Being Digital" scenario; the pseudo-Luddite scenario; and the future that I consider both most probable and most worth pursuing. Notably, the third future is the one that calls for us to appreciate what we have now and build on it, rather than casting it away in favor of some wondrous new beginning.
Tomorrow's realities will include portions of all three scenarios, particularly since each person has his or her own reality. Some people already seem intent on living life through keyboards and displays, only able to cope with physical life through a set of wireless devices to keep them Always Connected. I feel sorry for these people, but I'm sure they feel nothing but disdain for folks like me. Many people ignore the Web entirely, just as many people neither have nor particularly want home computers. I do not feel sorry for these people: many of them are living life to its fullest and getting by just fine. I also don't think that "the answer" to this perceived "problem" comes through Internet Appliances, Set-Top Boxes, or other devices. Some people aren't wired because they neither need to be nor want to be; there's nothing wrong with that.
Finally, of course, most of us work with a complex combination of digital and analog tools, virtual and physical media, Web connections and life beyond the computer. That mix keeps changing, and the changes are by no means always toward more extensive use of computers.
In a recent column in The Industry Standard, Hal Varian discussed a study done at UC Berkeley's replacement for a library school. That study suggests that most people won't pay much for full-time high-speed digital access in their homes, because most people don't see much need for such access. If Varian is right, a lot of business models will be crumbling over the next decade. Based on my own home life, I tend to think Varian is on to something. We can certainly afford another $20 to $30 a month for ADSL or cable Internet access, and we can probably get either or both any time we want it. We have two computers at home; without a home computer, I would never have written 15 books, 200 articles, or 80 speeches, all on my own time. But we don't see why we'd bother with high-speed full-time access. Are we typical? Not necessarily, but neither are we obviously behind the curve.
Now, on to the three scenarios.
The most dystopian future for the Web, and the least likely as a universal future (in my opinion), is the all-digital, all the time future. We hide in our houses and apartments, telecommuting, ordering our groceries and everything else for home delivery, getting all our entertainment and information over the One Big Wire. Television, magazines, radio, books, movies, ballet, opera, sports, and presumably painting and sculpture-all media are swept away by the Great and Devouring Web. Call it convergence, call it inevitability; whatever you call it, I find it horrendous.
I hear a hint of that future in the Semantic Web that Tim Berners-Lee discusses in Weaving the Web, and a touch of it in his hope that "The Web...would be part of the very fabric of the web of life we all help weave." Frankly, I don't want all the data in the world to look like one huge database with artificial intelligences crawling that database. But even calling the Web "part of the very fabric of the web of life" is a long way from the Web as life, the purely digital future that some people seem to hope for.
The all-digital future has little room for public libraries or for libraries and archives in general. I don't see such a future as having much room for meaning or contemplation either, but that may be my own problem. In the all-digital future, anything that hasn't been digitized is abandoned as useless-and I find that some proponents of an all-digital future are all too willing to dismiss anything more than five years old as being worthless in any case.
I've been accused of raising straw men, but I keep hearing simplistic all-digital futures projected at almost every library conference at which I speak. Just last month, I read the following, which I'll quote word for word: "Librarian selectors in some of our subject fields have already said that they would like to receive only e-books and do not feel the need for any printed books." In other words, some librarians at one major university library are suggesting that anything worth collecting in a modern university library must be digital, that there are no reasons to prefer printed books for any resources. I find that horrifying-all the more so because the librarian who was writing about it didn't see anything wrong with this all-digital stance.
I regard this as an aberration rather than a trend, or at least I hope that's the case. I think there's abundant evidence that traditional media will not disappear, and that they should not. Digital resources, Web-based or otherwise, will complement physical resources, sometimes replacing them where Web-based resources do the job better-but physical resources will continue to be critical, and printed books will continue to be a core medium for libraries, just as physical archives will continue to offer the raw material for remembering and rethinking who we were and who we are.
If we look at old and new media more carefully, we can see that addition is the rule, not replacement. Consider just a few of the many new and old media:
E-mail is still the heaviest use of the Internet and, in its many permutations, one of the most intriguing "new media." You may not think of e-mail as a medium, just as we never thought of personal correspondence as a medium. When you move beyond plain e-mail to listservs, Usenet, and the many different bulletin board systems, you have a more complex picture. Are these media? Yes, I believe they are. Are they worthy of library attention? I'm not sure, and I think the issues deserve further study.
Most of what you think of as books are not likely to be transformed, although quite a bit of what now gets published in bound paper form might work better in digital form. For that matter, most periodicals (as opposed to journals) aren't likely to turn all-digital any time soon. A more interesting note is that some scholars are building new media for scholarly output, media that may suit some of that output better than short-run scholarly monographs and narrow scholarly journals. If these scholars succeed, some of what's currently published in scholarly monographs and print journals will migrate to new media that do it better and that do things print can't do.
The suggestion that Web-delivered audio threatens record companies involves bad hearing and bad economics. Even today's streaming audio places heavy loads on the Internet infrastructure, and any suggestion that streaming audio is "CD-quality" or even close to it is ludicrous. CD Audio uses a bandwidth of 1.2 million bits per second; even the compressed channels in the sound portions of DVD use close to 400 Kbps, and that compression is audible to careful listeners. Good-quality MP3 audio uses 128Kbps to 160Kbps: that's a compression ratio of 10:1 to 12:1, and it's audible to most people who listen. But streaming audio uses a fraction of that bandwidth, and even so requires expensive servers to make it useful. In fact, reasonably high-quality MP3 does offer outlets for music that doesn't work for large labels-but it doesn't really represent a major threat to traditional sound recordings. Interestingly, even the always-enthusiastic market analysts seem to agree. A recent issue of Industry Standard (which is itself a well-done and growing weekly print magazine about the Internet economy) considered Web-based entertainment. One of the better forecasting firms projects that online sales of music will grow to represent 14% of music sales by 2003. But the same firm projects that sales of downloadable music will grow to represent six percent of that 14%--in other words, to less than one percent of all music sales. Another way to read those two projections is that, four years from now when the digital revolution has swept away everything else, more than 99% of all music sold will be in physical form-CDs, cassettes, MiniDiscs, DVD-Audio, SACD, and, yes, vinyl-and that six out of every seven sales will take place either in physical stores or through traditional mail order. So much for convergence and rapid media replacement.
Digital publications and distribution have already replaced some areas of book publishing (partly or wholly). That's as it should be. I shed no tears when Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature is replaced by online and CD-ROM indexes. Most households are better served by $30-$50 CD-ROM encyclopedias updated every year or two than by massive $600-$1,500 print encyclopedias that the households will never update. While good print atlases continue to matter, the best CD-ROM atlases offer ways of seeing the world that a print atlas can't duplicate-and these days, most CD-ROMs also point to newer updates on the World Wide Web.
If all you want is data, digital is probably the way to go-assuming you cope with authentication and reliability and either solve or ignore the preservation problem. But data really isn't very useful for most of us, most of the time. We may get data and, God help us, information-but what we want and need are stories: narratives that convey meaning, helping us to build knowledge and understanding. I seem to be too busy getting old soon to cope with that last stage, getting wisdom-but one can always hope.
This is probably more time than the all-digital future deserves-but I will add one more note. The World Wide Web has been around for less than a decade, less than one-third as long as MARC. If this conference had been held in 1992, people might have been speaking about the future of Gopher and the future impact of Gopher on libraries and archives. If it had been held in 1990, the topics might have been the future of Open Systems Interconnection, how soon the Internet would move from TCP/IP to OSI-compliant protocols (which some sensible people believed should and would happen, at least in 1990), and what OSI-based systems would mean for libraries and archives.
For that matter, many so-called business journalists and observers would look at this conference and say, "What's the point? The Internet is about business; the Web is about selling stuff. Libraries and archives don't sell stuff; they're irrelevant and doomed anyway. Why use a library when Amazon is on the Web?"
Is there some reason to believe that HTTP is the end of Internet innovation, that the Web is the basis for all future scenarios? If so, I can't imagine what that reason might be. Truth to tell, TCP/IP is an inefficient and aggravating set of protocols, and the stateless nature of the Web is a source of continuing grief for system developers and users alike. The most grandiose projections of all-digital futures, with the data walls responding to our presence and needs even before we know them, assume something far beyond today's World Wide Web, and I think it likely that-if such futures made any sense-the tools at their basis would have as little in common with the Web as the Web does with telnet or listserv technology.
My second scenario is included for completeness, and because there's a little bit of truth in it. A few years ago, some skeptics suggested that the Web was like CB radio: it was a fad that would, in time, move from general use to be the home for a set of fairly specialized uses. In that scenario, the Web becomes less significant as time goes on, and in a few years we wonder what all the fuss was about. Libraries and archives might use the Web as another way of providing access to your catalogs and resources, but you'd find less and less need to offer in-house Web access or think about new uses.
I find this dismissive future roughly as improbable as the all-digital future-but there are elements that seem plausible and worth noting. They particularly seem worth noting when librarians are considering the survival of physical media against the overpowering steamroller of the Web.
Ken Layne, writing in the Online Journalism Review, recently noted that there haven't been any bright new examples of Web-based magazines in the last year or so. Go beyond Slate, Salon, Nerve (if you're up to it), and Feed (what's left of it)-all of which have been around for several years-and what do you find? Surprisingly little. Meanwhile, Nerve starts a print magazine; Salon and Feed try to become some bizarre form of literary portal; and Slate settles into a fitful existence as a well-edited magazine of political views for people with unusually short attention spans. Meanwhile, new print magazines continue to appear (more now than in the past), and some of them flourish.
The explosion of magazines about the Web (or the Internet), and print resources devoted to Web addresses, will decline, if only because they don't make a lot of sense. For many of us, the Web has gone from fascination to tool, a part of life that isn't necessarily much more interesting than light bulbs or wall-to-wall carpeting. We use it, but it's less important (in some ways) than it used to be. I know my own set of favorites is shrinking, not growing, and that if I cared to take the time, it would shrink by half from its current small size. It used to take me two long coffeebreaks and another quarter hour at home each day to check out the sites I thought deserved daily visits; that's down to about 15 minutes total per day, excluding directly work-related sites.
The overpowering concentration on the Web as business comes with a sobering side effect. For most of us, most of the time, business isn't all that interesting. We may have gotten a little too involved during the Internet stock mania, but that mania may be subsiding, and many of us are getting back to life itself. If the Web is just about business, then it's fundamentally boring.
If there's one constant with regard to hype, it is that hype doesn't last. As the Web moves beyond hype, it's likely to lose some of its luster-but the real problems won't go away.
I don't believe that the Web (or the much broader Internet) will dwindle into insignificance, although I do believe that most of us will find that we really don't need or want to spend hours on the Web every day. I also believe that we'll see retrenchment. It's happening already. Boo.com is gone. Drkoop.com is going. We'll see some of the me-too search engines and portals disappear within the next year, and perhaps half of Web business sites will become ghost malls over the next few years. I truly hope that Google isn't one of the losers: that's one of the rare cases in which I'd really like to see more banner ads on a site!
That's enough about the scenario that has the Web becoming pass´e.
Most good libraries and archives now use the Web as an entr´ee to the library: a way to inform the world what you're about, where you are, your hours, your special services, your calendar and more.
Many institutions now offer their catalogs on the Web, frequently with access to circulation information, holds, and renewals for registered patrons. Some good online catalogs are now entirely Web-based (that is, have only Web interfaces); unfortunately, so are some not-so-good catalogs.
Many institutions band together to go beyond their own catalogs, offering regional and other union catalogs both within the libraries and on the general Web.
Some archives are mounting detailed finding aids on your own websites, either using SGML via EAD or through less standardized Web methods. RLG's Archival Resources combines thousands of SGML-encoded finding aids, thousands more available as Web resources, and the half-million Archival and Mixed Collections bibliographic records into a new national resource. We do charge for that resource, as we add significant value to the set of source materials.
Many museums and archives are mounting locally digitized surrogates for key elements of your collections as Web exhibitions, telling your stories in new ways and sometimes telling new stories.
RLG's Cultural Materials Alliance aims to develop new ways to combine digital surrogates, in order to improve access to existing resources and to support new forms of scholarship.
And, of course, you use the open Web to increase your store of resources-and the protected Web as a carrier for full-text articles, vocabulary-controlled databases, and many other resources.
Those are just a few examples of present and future use. Libraries and archives will find new ways to use the Internet and the Web (separately and together) to improve services and resources-but as part of a complex mix, not as the sole future.
Real libraries combine resources, services, and places. The places are important, all the more so as some of yesterday's most dismal predictions are turning out false. In this case, I speak of the set of predictions that had us all fleeing from one another, hiding in our houses and apartments, bringing everything to us and avoiding the community. Instead we might turn to so-called virtual communities, Web-based groupings of people around the world with similar interests-but meanwhile, our cities and towns would shrivel as we turned away from civic involvement. The kind word was cocooning, and universal telecommuting was part of the prediction. It was a future that seemed to some to be inevitable by now-and it was a future that didn't hold much hope for public libraries as places, particularly public libraries in central cities.
Fortunately, that future of universal flight was as false as most simplistic futures. I won't claim that the problems of white flight and suburban anomie have disappeared or that all cities are now urban wonderlands once more. Nothing is ever that simple. But I will claim, based on loads of examples, that people are returning to cities in many cases-and that people are turning suburbs into communities as well.
Real communities-population centers where people get together as part of everyday life-are coming back. I see it where I work (and now live), where a dying main street that emptied out after work has been transformed into the heart of a thriving city center, with performing arts, restaurants that do dinner as well as lunch business, and-oh yes-a new public library. I see it in Oakland, where a hard-hit city is starting to come back to life. There are signs all over the country, not uniformly but frequently: people haven't given up on community life, and most people understand the difference between virtual communities and physical ones.
In many cities and towns, public libraries have been the most resilient of the public spaces. Even as people abandoned the parks, moved their shopping to the malls, and headed for restaurants in the suburbs, public libraries survived. With the resurgence of community spirit, we've seen a resurgence of new and expanded public libraries-the great New Mains of the 1990s and the ambitious plans for branch expansion and modernization that will continue into this decade and beyond.
Libraries work. People use libraries-and in many towns and suburbs, people gathered at their libraries when there were no other places to gather. Not surprisingly, towns and cities are building on that success, grouping other community functions around the libraries. Librarians should welcome that growth-but librarians and their boards should assure that it's not simply a matter of assigning new community functions to libraries without appropriate funding.
For most communities, the local history center can sensibly be part of the library. In many cases, so can local archiving functions-with support. It's not uncommon for a public library to also be the community art gallery or museum; both are sensible extensions if accompanied by support.
Good libraries serve a range of functions, many of them purely physical, all of them important. Don't devalue the free circulation of romance novels and mysteries to lower-income patrons. Don't devalue story telling hours and community programs. Don't devalue leisure reading collections, study spaces, and other "frills" in academic libraries. Those are valuable services, helping to make the community stronger and improve the overall mental and social health of its people.
Libraries need to provide the cultural record, and to provide a range of information, enlightenment, and entertainment to those who wouldn't have ready access to it otherwise. Libraries typically deal more in digested data-information that someone has organized with some thought-than in late-breaking news and raw data. That's always been their primary role. It should continue to be. It's not the most glamorous role-but it's important and realistic.
I'd love to discuss the problems of preserving those new packages of meaning that are born digital, particularly ones where printing out the package on acid-free paper won't work. Long-term access to digital materials is one of RLG's three major initiatives for this year and the next few years; we won't solve the problem, but we should be able to serve as a focus of efforts to work on it.
But I look at this afternoon's program and see that we have four experts, each of whom is far more qualified than I am to speak to this area. For that matter, three of the four experts are from RLG member institutions. So the sensible move is to mention this problem and move along.
But I can't resist offering an extended anecdote that illustrates the problems of true long-term preservation, with apologies to those who heard this discussion at a nearby conference in April.
Gregory Benford is a fine hard science fiction writer who is also a practicing scientist. In a recent science column in Fantasy & Science Fiction, he discussed the real problem of how we can pass our culture and history-or a specific note, namely "this is a radioactive waste dump, keep away!"-for the real long term: not only centuries but millennia (tens of them for radioactive waste). One of Benford's colleagues said, "why not just put it on CD-ROM and scatter lots of copies around? Someone will pick one up, be intrigued, and retrieve the information."
Benford was, I assume, polite enough to cover up his laughter-but when he discussed it in the column, he missed some crucial points. He said, probably incorrectly, that the bits will "peel away" from a CD-ROM's substrate within a few decades, making it useless. That's factually sloppy and may be incorrect. The bits are part of the substrate, pressed into a sheet of polycarbonate, one of the sturdiest and least chemically reactive plastics known. What might peel away or degenerate is the sputtered aluminum or gold reflective layer. Without that layer, it would be more difficult to read the bits-but not necessarily impossible.
There are reasons to believe that a well made CD-ROM or CD-R will last at least a century, and perhaps much longer. Does that make it a good candidate for truly long-term preservation, particularly across civilization gaps? Absolutely not.
For the next century, the problem is simple enough: will there be machines capable of reading CD-ROMs and making sense of what's on them? Will there be CD-ROM readers in two decades? Almost certainly yes, in the form of DVD-ROM readers. Will there be CD-ROM readers in five decades? It's possible, but they'll be very specialized items. Will there be CD-ROM readers in a century? The probability gets pretty small at that point, based on history.
But let's look at what happens across a civilization gap or across a millennium. We've burned critical records onto a CD-ROM, made ten thousand copies, and scattered them worldwide. Amazingly enough, after a thousand years the polycarbonate is still intact (plausible) and the aluminum is good enough (somewhat less plausible; the resin protecting the aluminum is more reactive).
Someone picks up one of these shiny discs. What do they do with it?
First of all, if you saw one of these things in 1965, would you have thought of it as a dense information storage medium-or as a really neat ornament, with those rainbow patterns on one side? Would you try to find a player for it, or would you treat it like a slightly dangerous Frisbee?
Let's be optimistic. The finder doesn't think it's a shiny toy; somehow, they think there's important stuff on it. What do they do next? Under a microscope or strong magnifying glass, the grooves are visible (actually, the single groove is visible, but never mind). If they feel the surface, they can see that it's not an engraved groove at the surface level, so if they understand laser technology, they might think that's a way to go. With enough investigation, they might be able to determine the bandwidth and depth of focus to be able to read the pits and lands. We're getting way out into improbabilities here, but they might even be able to get a stream of raw data.
So what then? That stream doesn't consist of words and music, or obvious numbers, or much of anything. It's not even an ASCII stream-not that that would help much, since the chances of ASCII being meaningful in a millennium are absurdly low. (After all, we're already beginning the move from ASCII to Unicode; how likely is it that we'll suddenly drop back to universal use of a terribly limited encoding set?)
What's encoded on a CD-ROM or an audio CD is very much the result of complex computer algorithms applied to source data. That's why you can put a strip of black tape a 32nd of an inch wide radially on an audio CD, and good CD players will play the music with nary an interruption. Sony's encoding techniques, their part of the Sony-Philips CD partnership, provide for massive amounts of error correction, but as a result involve massive amounts of data manipulation and duplication. The basic technique is called a cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon code, and between it and other encoding techniques, data manipulation overhead accounts for fully two-thirds of the raw data on a compact disc.
Being able to read the pattern of pits and lands on a compact disc would tell a future historian nothing about what was on the disc. Without Sony-Philips' Red Book for audio CDs and Yellow Book for CD-ROMs, and without the computing capabilities to turn those extended specifications into programs, that pattern of pits and lands would be useless.
So there we have it: five levels of technological separation between a shiny 12cm. disc and useful resources from that disc:
Anyone care to estimate the odds on that combination of five hurdles? Now: do you have a better way to communicate across many generations? And, if so, does it involve something other than ink on paper-or, better yet, lines cut into stones?
Incidentally, the group that studied the nuclear-dump-labeling problem concluded that Rosetta Stones were the way to go: stone pillars with incised warnings in the most common languages and scripts of our day, with the hope that at least one of those languages or scripts will survive long enough.
Digital archiving is tough. The easy solutions won't work. Such is life.
Anyone who's ever heard me speak must know that I'm bad at conclusions. Think of me as the Stephen King of speaking, but without his gift for plot, language, storytelling, and money. This speech is no exception: I don't have a good way of pulling all this together into a neat little package or, as annoying magazines put it, a "takeaway."
I think that "And, not or" is a good basis for thinking about the future: adding new forms of information and meaning to present ones, only replacing present ones where that makes good sense. I believe libraries and archives are making effective use of the Web already, to extend their services and to gain access to new resources; I believe that we-RLG and others-will develop new and more innovative ways to use the Web in the service of libraries, archives, their collections, and their users.
I don't expect to see an all-digital future-and I don't want to see such a future. I don't expect to see the Internet become pass´e, and I don't expect the Web to become next year's Gopher (although that's possible); given my current and future job expectations, I would hardly wish to see that happen! I do expect and hope for a future in which we make effective use of physical and digital resources to provide the record of our culture, tell new stories, and find better ways to tell old stories. And I look forward to hearing this afternoon's presentations on ways that we can preserve the new stories that require digital access.
Thank you.
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Updated June 10, 2000