If everyone could, at a very personal level, compare and contrast the world as it has been over time and space, they could gain some understanding for themselves of what to expect in the new millennium. The technology for building such an understanding is finally possible on a grand scale in a pioneering research experiment. It is possible to build information collections of many sizes from large to small, and to search these collections easily across the Net. Furthermore, the new information infrastructure will routinely support analysis environments, which enable easy correlation of information across multiple sources. Thus problem solving and question answering will be within the reach of everyday people, just as fetching and browsing are now.
Scholarly works exist that demonstrate that collecting an adequate range of materials is possible.
For example, the historian Fernand Braudel's book on The Structures of Everyday Life discusses how people lived in the 15th century with many of the same problems of the 20th. But to engage ordinary people, the concentration must be on recent history and the collections generated by local sources. The contents of these collections will be organized around the primary structures of everyday life, which represent the primary components of cultural memory. The collections will consist of text and images from numerous sources that either mirror or preserve recent cultural history. All of the pictures and text must have classification metadata indicating how they relate to the Structures.