Realizing the Information Future The Internet and Beyond (1994) / Chapter Skim
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3 Research, Education, and Libraries
3 Research, Education, and Libraries
Pages 112-147
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From page 112... ...
Research, higher education, and libraries subsume a number of elements that are sometimes separately addressed under the health care umbrella, such as health-related research, education, and library support.2 The experiences of the research, education, and library communities illustrate some of the tensions among what different groups of communities need, want, and can afford tensions that will be replicated or expanded as the nation moves to a truly national information infrastructure (NII)
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From page 113... ...
, from the network facilities themselves to expensive devices and information resources attached to them. Another quantitative benefit is the effective reduction of the cost of reproducing and distributing information- it is often cheaper to duplicate and transmit information electronically rather than in paper or other physical media.
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From page 114... ...
Even me Avid to electronically access text can present real savings: physicists, for exa~ple, have en~usiashcaNy developed and used electronic archives ~ areas such as Ngh-energy physics that are stored at Los ^lamos National Laboratory facHides as an alternative to buying journals mat cost h~dreds to thousands of dollars per year for subscriptions. Me of the many new Internet tools mat has facOHated ~formabon sharing and collaboration ~ biomedical research ~ the Mosaic hypermedia browser used by researchers s~dy~g the genome of me Quit Oy Orosop~fl~ mel~sfcr Through the efforts of a large number of researchers in Cam laboratories, approximately 90 percent of the genome ~ this species has now been cloned onto 10,000 fragments where approx~ately 3,000 conventional loci have also been mapped.
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From page 115... ...
If development of high-performance computing and communications technologies in academia and industry continues, network capabilities should expand at rates that may initially exceed the demand generated by the science community. The increase in capabilities will make possible an overall shift from electronic mail exchange and modest file transfer activities to on-line distribution of large volumes of data (both measured and modeled)
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From page 116... ...
, and be quasi-ubiquitous in order to connect investigators and sites. Such a network service is also needed to provide for others, such as educators, access to the eventual results of scientific research and to enable educators to carry out their own research using network resources.
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From page 117... ...
High bandwidth will also continue to be required to support real-time interactions (e.g., to support remote access to special instruments or even video conferencing) and remote access to high-performance computing devices—the performance of which continues to increase.l2 In addition, interactive activities such as commanding spacecraft and monitoring remote instruments entail networking needs that greatly exceed current capacities and sophistication.
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From page 118... ...
That prospect cannot be realized until the network supports multimedia traffic, provides the needed large bandwidths, and provides a more secure environment. A central question regarding the supply of information infrastructure to the research community is the distribution of needs.
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From page 119... ...
Networking for this and other segments of the education community attracted federal attention somewhat later than networking for research partly because teaching faculty, most college students, and academic librarians—except for those involved with scientific research had no access to the network until it was opened to them in 1988 with the expansion of the original National Research Network program into the NREN What they had were only their own visions of potentialities, program. often growing out of experiences with television and satellite broadcasting, which introduced telecommunications into the teaching-learning process.~9 The renaming of the federal NREN program to include education was a result of the library, academic computing, and education communities' intense, aggressive lobbying, political activity that also spurred the development of new organizations and activities dedicated to developing and applying information infrastructure for higher education.20 .
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From page 120... ...
Students, especially graduate students, will want to pursue degree programs and professional development courses at teleconferencing sites that are convenient for them. For many students, especially older or adult students, convenient teleconferencing and remote access, in combination with the quality of their courses, may become more important than many of the campus experiences that accompany the traditional attending of classes at the institution itself.2i In addition, the "electronic outreach" capability provided by the NII can enhance the recruitment and retention efforts of all educational institutions.
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From page 121... ...
system, with 20 campuses serving 350,000 students, illustrates the potential for significant savings on the acquisition of information resources through partnerships with vendors, such as Mead Data Central and Dow [ones News/Retrieval, which have been willing to offer services at a discount in return for being able to effectively promote their services to students. For example, the database service set known as LEXIS-NEXIS is accessed by students and faculty at all CSU campuses (at present, by approximately 200 concurrent users system-wide)
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From page 122... ...
The expansion of programs relating to mathematics and science education at NSF, the launch and proposed expansion of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program, the signs of greater interest in technology at the Department of Education and that department's inclusion in the new Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications (IITA)
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From page 123... ...
Indeed, cost is a key reason that data networking connectivity among the educational community has basically only trickled down from the major research universities to other four-year schools and then to the two-year schools, with the K-12 and public library communities bringing up the rear. For example, Michigan has over 5,000 K-12 school buildings, a number dwarfing the 135 MichNet attachments (for all kinds of research and education institutions)
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From page 124... ...
Although research users of the Internet typically effect connections through local area networks, where LANs are found in K-12 schools, the motivation has often been to support computer-aided instruction in a single classroom rather than to link multiple classrooms or provide access to external networks. Also, many personal computers in schools are not capable of connection to LANs and/or they may not have the necessary disk or memory capacity to support network applications.26 Finally, schools also lack the resources to install new technology.
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From page 125... ...
RESEARCH EDUCED\ ~~ LILIES comm~cabon among people is Me prime benefit of ne~or~g for edncahon as coUeagues, teachers, students and parents gag access to a level of co~kahon not possible before. Educators ~ bog higher education and K-12 education are now berg enabled to participate collaborate prefects.
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From page 126... ...
Perhaps most importantly, information infrastructure holds the promise of changing the processes of teaching, education, and learning (Box 3.3~. Where this happens, resources will be reallocated from printbased to on-line resources (depending, in part, on publishers' support for electronic source material)
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From page 130... ...
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From page 131... ...
Provision of the broad NII envisioned in this report is an important step in this direction. But until a systemic approach is taken that applies to all types of education professionals and activities and addresses the requirements of implementing a new communications system, much work will be needed to truly integrate networking and information infrastructure into schooling.
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From page 132... ...
Where access has been achieved, teachers report that disadvantaged students have gained access to resources and have responded far beyond what has been observed with more conventional educational approaches (see Box 3.3~. Equally important will be the outreach capability of the networks to ensure that the poor or rural residents of a community are not excluded.30 Realizing that potential, however, is a function of time: the NTIA Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program can make only one contribution, the NSF Connections program and NIE program two others, and it may be several years before all K-12 schools (of which there are more than 110,000)
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From page 133... ...
The potential for information infrastructure to support paraprofessionals and allied health professionals in medicine, for example, is already in evidence. An extension of this facility will be seen in the growing number of information entrepreneurs providing information for a fee to laypersons on selected professional subjects using such resources as electronic bulletin boards and specially designed electronic libraries.
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From page 135... ...
Research and academic libraries resemble the research and higher-education communities that they serve in terms of problems and prospects; public libraries resemble K-12 education in terms of severe financing conditions and service to a broad community.33 Also, as in K-12 education, public libraries often are limited by inadequate physical infrastructure and training, and they tend to be extremely sensitive to cost.34 In the NREN environment, research and academic libraries have taken a leadership role in advancing network-based initiatives to provide access to information resources in support specifically of research and higher education through interconnection and interlibrary loans. They also support wider segments of the public.35 Reduced operating hours at local public library facilities, reflecting budget constraints, have shifted demand to research and academic libraries, a shift enabled in part by network connections.
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From page 136... ...
Public access programs and policies proposed and implemented today will be central to this emerging information infrastructure. Libraries participate in numerous experiments and pilot programs that demonstrate the utility of high-capacity networks for the exchange and use of information for all disciplines (Box 3.7~.
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From page 138... ...
The evolution of the digital library and its distributed nature are fundamental characteristics relating to the digital library's value to the user; and · Accessibility and interactivity: Digital libraries will be accessible to new communities and a wider-range of users. The resulting availability of new research and new knowledge will in turn increase the value of the digital library, a benefit that will come from the interactivity between the user and the digital library.40 Creation of digital libraries will likely exacerbate information management and policy issues and will require additional research to resolve problems that may thwart progress (see Chapter 4~.4i Many if not all of the information policy issues requiring attention are not new.
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From page 140... ...
Broad use of digitized resources outside of a library facility with professional staff is expected to increase with home-based and other remote access to information infrastructure. Overall, the future role of libraries will evolve to reflect and interact with developments in individual, personal information retrieval systems and also developments in the publishing arena and other sources of supply for electronic information resources.
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From page 142... ...
That sharing enables broader use of resources than would be possible if each researcher, educator, librarian, or student had to be individually capitalized. In addition, as the Internet experience demonstrates, information infrastructure can facilitate cross-sectoral sharing, including the building of bridges between K-12 education and high
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From page 143... ...
- r It would be a mistake, however, to frame NII planning for the research, education, and library communities simplyfrom the perspective of.financial aid requirements. These commu~uties have been information providers as well as consumers, and they will continue to make important contributions to network information resources In this regard In the future.
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From page 144... ...
1990. "Internet Access to Information Resources," Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST)
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From page 145... ...
The Network shall provide access, to the extent practicable, to electronic information resources maintained by libraries, research facilities, publishers, and affiliated organizations." PL 102-194, section 102.
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From page 146... ...
The licensing contract typically includes statements that define the user community permitted to utilize the electronic information as well as terms that define the specific uses that this user community may make of the licensed electronic information. See Lynch, Clifford A
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From page 147... ...
44. Note that libraries may have greater integration of networking for public access and internal operational purposes than is typical of K-12 education.
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