Chapter 14: Current and Future Services
Television did not kill radio broadcasting, cable did not eliminate broadcasting, cellular phones have not replaced wall units, and interactive information services will not destroy existing media.
Television did not kill radio broadcasting, cable did not eliminate broadcasting, cellular phones have not replaced wall units, and interactive information services will not destroy existing media.
The dream of a universal fountain of information, free for all comers, will ever remain that: a dream. If this were simply an illusion, I’d shrug. But the rush to computerize libraries has several nasty side effects.
People are lazy. Ease of use is more important than content. Put something online – anything – and researchers will love it, whether or not it’s right. This is a driving force behind the move for online libraries and indeed the Internet itself.
The National Information Infrastructure will make it much simpler for U.S. citizens to gain access to information they have already paid for.
The National Information Infrastructure will make available a wide variety of simulation-based education and training services that can be accessed through home or industry telecommunication systems. These simulation-based training systems will be tailored to a specific domain and will allow a student to live in that domain.
Rapidly assembled response teams, consisting of Federal, state, and volunteer organizations, will be able to share and update electronic plans, collaborate during the execution of the plan, and use that plan as a basis for real-time training. Crisis planners would also be able to “collaborate through time” by comparing planned actions with historically relevant plans and through advanced simulation services.
To explore the full benefits of … digital libraries, the challenge for research and development is not merely how to connect everyone and everything together in the network. Rather, it is to achieve economically feasible technologies with which to digitize massive corpora of existing and new information from heterogeneous and distributed sources; then store, search, process and retrieve the information in a user-friendly way.
While entertainment applications will drive the connection of homes to the National Information Infrastructure, Vice President [Al] Gore has set the additional ambitious challenge of interconnecting all the schools and libraries by the turn of the century.
Network-based education has the benefits of mass production and mass distribution. It can also work in a tutorial mode so that it can deliver answers to a student’s questions. It combines the best post-industrial production methods with the capacity to deliver education in th best Socratic tradition.
What will the electronic book look like? Some sort of miniature laptop computer, I’d guess. We’ll download selections and page through them electronically. Try reading electronic books. They’re awful. What a great way to drive patrons away from libraries.