From: LIBPACS@UHUPVM1.BITNET (Public-Access Computer Systems Forum)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.pacs-l
Subject: FYI France, Part II
Date: 17 Nov 92 19:53:22 GMT
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU

From: Jack Kessler <kessler@well.sf.ca.us>
Subject: FYI France -- Europe, at least, discovers the users. Part 2 of 2.

     This is the second of two parts of a report on the "Network
Services Conference" held at Pisa, Italy, November 2-4: a first
effort, in Europe or elsewhere, to address "the users" as a formal
part of networked information.


A Comprehensive Approach at Columbia Law

     Willem Scholten presented Project Janus, Columbia University
law library's effort to, 1) avoid microforms, 2) bring the library
to the user (Manhattan presents critical space problems), and, 3)
adapt to changing patterns of information distribution. The project
involves participation by Thinking Machines Corp., the university's
main and health sciences libraries, the law library, and the United
Nations library human rights collection. One critical goal was
preservation of the law library's unique and rapidly-deteriorating
collections of Nuremberg (375,000 double-sided pages) and Rosenberg
(250,000 double-sided pages) trial documents. Their solution uses
a special "XWAIS", a highly-customized version of the publicly-
available WAIS tool, digitization with ocr, optical and magnetic
tape, and Z39.50 and ISO's SR/1, two "Sun Sparc workstation
networks", a "Xerox Docutech 7000 scanner and ocr system", and a
"CM2-32K Thinking Machines parallel processing super-computer": all
the latest stuff.

     Many hands have been in on the project: the law
school publishes 13 legal periodicals, for example, and the goal of
getting such publishing costs back in-house is being approached
through SGML and e-publishing on the system. The reference desk is
interested in information which has time value and takes too long
to get into print: the system loaded the North American Free Trade
Agreement recently and at last count was getting 200-250 "hits" per
day on that resource, and similar figures have been achieved for
online versions of the Maastricht Treaty and the papers of the Rio
Conference on the Environment. One other library dream, of loading
fulltext direct from commercial publishers, also at least is under
discussion with Simon & Schuster: user licences for the library,
based on a flat fee with royalties for downloading.

Closing: John "Matrix" Quarterman -- the Global view

     John Quarterman began his conference-closing keynote address
with the warning that he wouldn't make predictions -- "my crystal
ball's kinda cloudy", he said -- and then proceeded to make them.
He has put together a wonderfully-interesting series of maps, all
using data taken from various domain-name registries and servers,
showing where all the network use is taking place in the world
(surprising activity patterns in Iceland, Australia, Moscow, Hong
Kong), and suggesting a continuing rate of usage growth so
phenomenal as to be catastrophic for both the networks and
librarians. It seems still that only Quarterman, despite his good
influence exerted since the 1988 publication of his book, "The
Matrix", has the breadth of vision, and the patience, to look at
all the world's information networks -- Internet, EARN, BITNET,
etc. -- as a whole.

Conclusions? 1 -- the impending invasion of the commercial market

     The real problem, lurking behind most of the conference talk,
is what to do about the impending invasion of the commercial
market. The commercial publishers are poised to plunge into the
little world of academic networking, we heard again and again.
Quarterman showed us a fascinating map, on which the portion of
world network use devoted to "purely academic" activity -- which
represented ALL network use a short time ago -- now is small and is
shrinking rapidly: "academic use" will become an insignificant part
of networking as a whole, shortly, he asserted.

Conclusions? 2 -- "the academic model will not scale"

     The problem, then, acknowledged again and again by US and non-
US attendees, is that "the academic model will not scale": as
network use grows, the tools and structures and carefully-developed
"standards" -- think of MARC, SGML, ftp, telnet, opac user
interfaces, even ASCII -- will not satisfy a non-academic,
international, user public: a despairing conclusion -- one which
left several librarian-users in the audience feeling a little
abandoned. "Information overload" then, inevitably, was debated:
several people felt that a bad network situation in this respect is
about to get much, much, worse.

Conclusions? 3 -- "the academic model had BETTER scale"

     Some braver souls, though, insisted that private industry will
need some standards as well: if not necessarily for sharing
information  easily as an altruistic goal, as the academic world
wants, then at least for ensuring the compatibility of its own
hardware, software, and services with a particular marketing
structure: IBM products and services talking to each other,
Siemens' doing the same, all the components of a local or wide-are
network -- serving fulltext newspapers to northern California,
Shakespeare to the entire Ivy League, or Montaigne (or Simenon) to
Touraine -- able to communicate among themselves. Private industry
will have to start somewhere in all this, and that beginning may
well be made with at least some of the elaborate tools and
standards which have been asembled by the careful academic
community today. Such, at least, is the hope.

Conclusions? 4 -- the Atlantic is a very wide pond

     It was very interesting for this American to note the
fundamental difference between the US and the European approaches
on the standards point. Much good work on standards is being done
on both sides of the Atlantic. But the intense preoccupation with
standards and consensus-building in general is markedly different
in Europe than it is in the US. Great levels of bureaucracy, much
tedious negotiation, and great levels of frustration, all are
devoted to accomplishing the smallest point of agreement in Europe,
ruled constantly by the conviction that without some sort of "top-
down" agreement, no "bottom-up" effort will succeed. Not that
bureaucracy and haggling don't take place in the US context; but
there seems to be more in Europe, and it's much more intense, and
deemed to be much more necessary. Law students everywhere learn
that Anglo-American law may be built piecemeal, upon the "Common
Law", and upon individual cases, while Continental law is a
seamless web of "codes", which are thought to cover all conceivable
instances. There is this same longing for "codification" in
European networking standards work: piecemeal, such as has
characterized the evolution of the Internet, will not do in Europe
-- they need "top-down" codes and standards, before they can
proceed rather than after -- a major difference from the US
approach. Conference chair Jennings mused about this, pointedly, to
the several US attendees and speakers: "You must remember that you
are one, gigantic, country, while we are by comparison a very
large, but still very disunited, collection of very small
countries." It is interesting to consider whether the US or the
European "consensus-model" will more readily "scale up" to the
rapidly-evolving world information Matrix.

"Information Overload"

     "Network Services '92", then, came to the conclusion that it
may well become impossible to service the networks during the next
few years: too many, too much, understood and aided by too few. The
glass which appears half empty, however, also is half full. There
will be many more users and many more things to do. Conference
chair Jennings also pointed out, however, that the evolution of the
telephone was aided by a paradigm shift: fears early in this
century that there never would be enough telephone operators were
answered by the users becoming the operators themselves. Just so,
Jennings insists, a paradigm shift will occur in networked
information. The bottlenecks which exist today -- of costs and
hardware capacities and user training and clumsy interfaces -- may
be resolved ultimately by similar shifts: "transparent" interfaces,
"invisible" technologies, "paperless" libraries, "hypertext"
organization and access -- it's hard to tell what from here, but
something.

A Role for Librarians -- the librarian's glass may be half full

     One final optimistic note sounded by the conference left the
librarians in the audience feeling smug. Already, no one can FIND
anything on the "nets", and it seems that this problem is not going
away: it seems, in fact, that the entry of the commercial market is
about to make the "navigating" problem much, much, worse.
Navigating through information resources is what librarians do:
it's what we've done for centuries. It is nice to feel needed: it's
reassuring to discover how badly we're going to be needed by the
information network users in Europe and elsewhere during the next
few years.

Italy, and Europe

     An American can't attend a conference in Pisa without noting
that the leaning tower still is leaning -- more, these days -- and
that the streets of nearby Florence have suffered a discernible
increase in their level of dirt since the '60s. The hotel we were
in could lose four of its three stars easily. Still, there's never
been an era in its history when Italy hasn't been described by
foreigners in terms of its dust and its noise and its chaos:
capable of great heights and great depths, like any other human
hive. And still, as an American, it's hard to get used to the idea
that you can walk down a dark, deserted urban street at night
without incredible fear. There are many US-European differences,
among them differences in approaches to networked information. Any
US reader of this is highly recommended to take a look at what is
happening in information networks on the European side: they are
looking at users, they are more concerned -- perhaps wisely,
perhaps not effectively, so -- with standards, and they sponsor
conferences which feature good food, good parties, and Bach in the
Pisa Duomo.


Jack Kessler

kessler@well.sf.ca.us
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