CHAPTER TWELVE

NETWORKS AND THE NATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS INFRASTRUCTURE

The full realization of the model of scholarly communication described here depends, finally, upon the development of an adequate national telecommunications infrastructure, capable of moving vast quantities of text and data at very high speeds. Such an infrastructure could provide a scholar or student at a particular institution almost instantaneous access to bibliographic information stored elsewhere and facilitate the rapid delivery of full texts. Although the library community was not represented during the beginning stages of planning for the National Research and Education Network (NREN),[1] its interests are now certainly reflected in thinking about the aims and purposes of the network; indeed, the vision of a virtual library[2]---a national collection of digitized texts, distributed among institutions and accessible from anywhere at any time---is fundamental to many individuals' conception of the NREN.

NATIONAL RESEARCH AND EDUCATION NETWORK (NREN)

Although computing and telecommunications networks have existed for several decades, their proliferation has been ad hoc. One principal objective of the NREN is a kind of harmonization of the existing variety of architectures, systems, and protocols. Dr. Robert Kahn, president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, a coalition of major telecommunications and computer corporations, government agencies, and educational institutions that have agreed to undertake the research necessary to create an integrated network,[3] likens the developing infrastructure to the nation's highway system, as his colleague John Garrett reports:

Kahn ... likes to draw an analogy between the emerging electronic systems for managing and conveying information ... and the nation's highways.... [R]elative ease of travel [is] dependent on a long, complex process of generation and integration of highways from community to community.... Robert Frost did not know or care whether his road less traveled was under town, state, or interstate jurisdiction, and I suspect most of the rest of us don't care either. Why should we? The system functions seamlessly (except for an occasional toll or overzealous state trooper) and transparently to the user: because it is there, and it works, it can safely be ignored. If we are very fortunate, the comprehensive infrastructure that will link sources of information and users will be as invisible as the national network of highways.[4]

The first of the prototypes of the NREN was ARPANET, funded in 1969 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the Department of Defense.[5] One important characteristic of ARPANET and other networks funded by DARPA was the commitment to a standard communications protocol (TCP/IP), which permits transmission of text and data among systems of different kinds.[6] Since the mid-1980s the National Science Foundation has established a number of supercomputer centers; a high-speed communications network known as the NSFNET links the centers electronically and provides users with electronic access to the data stored on the computers. The NSFNET has now effectively superseded the ARPANET and is the domestic "spinal column" of the Internet, a network of local, regional, national, and international networks. Also founded in the 1980s was BITNET, described as the first major network to be based solely on interest and willingness to connect rather than disciplinary specialty, mainframe type, or funding source.[7] Among the standard options available on these networks are electronic mail and file transfer services;[8] in addition, many universities, as we have seen, have mounted their online library catalogs on the Internet.[9]

In part because of the rapid, ad hoc growth of the networks[10] and the resultant patchwork quality of the current situation (the Internet "consists of autonomous entities that are interconnected" in the words of one observer[11]), in part because of broad agreement on the extraordinary economic and social importance of an adequate information infrastructure, the federal government recently enacted legislation designed to rationalize and upgrade the Internet. It is this upgraded, harmonized network that is the NREN.

Fundamental to the conception of the NREN is a three-tiered hierarchy of networks, which replicates the structure of the present Internet.[12] The NSFNET currently includes 13 nodes, each the hub in turn of a regional network, which in its turn comprises local campus networks linked to one another. The first tier---the spinal column---is to be managed by an independent, nonprofit organization created by Merit, Inc., IBM, and MCI Communications Corporation.[13] The second tier---the regional networks---have as their prototypes such existing regional networks as the New York State Education and Research Network (NYSERNet), the John von Neumann Computer Network (JvNCnet),[14] and the Bay Area Regional Research Network. The third tier will consist of networks operating within individual educational institutions or research laboratories.

In technical terms, the upgrading consists in part of replacing twisted copper cable with fiber-optic cable, pure-glass filaments that carry the data in the form of light pulses;[15] the resultant transmission speeds are considerably faster than the fastest permitted by the Internet. At the highest speeds currently attainable, for example, some 50 pages of text can be transmitted per second. The NREN is intended to be a gigabit network, capable of moving some one billion bits (or binary digits) of data per second, or the equivalent of about 30,000 pages of text.[16] Such increased capacity is important not solely for purposes of speed of transmission, however; it is also demanded by information existing in particular forms (sound, for example, or high resolution graphics, moving graphic images, video, and multimedia formats).[17] The increased capacity should also serve to relieve the highway congestion occurring on the Internet.[18] Of course, not all users will need to exploit the NREN's full capacity at all times. "If users ... can set ... `levers,'" explains Michael Dertouzos,

choose the combination of transmission speed, security and reliability appropriate for their task, then they need only pay for the service they want. The alternative---a highly secure and lightning-fast transport service that would satisfy all potential needs---would be so expensive that it would never become widely used.[19]

The NREN should to an unprecedented degree facilitate the collaboration of colleagues widely separated geographically in that remote, immediate access to the contents of databases assembled and maintained cooperatively will be greatly enhanced.[20] It is also envisioned that the network will contain a number of information resources and services: directories of users and files, the texts of monographs and periodicals, the contents of databases of bibliographic and primary information, user support systems, and so on.[21] As indicated earlier, Robert Kahn's vision extends to a type of information service called a Knowbot, or Knowledge Robot. Because information resources are widely distributed---because they do not exist in a single, centralized computer but instead in local systems subject to specialized protocols---there will be a need for a service that assembles information from a wide variety of sources and packages it in a way that is familiar and accessible to end-users. Here, too, there is a need for increased network and local storage capacity commensurate with the quantity of data to be accumulated by Knowbots, which could be programmed to scan every monograph and periodical in a particular discipline and assemble all the references on a particular topic.[22]

Before concluding this section on the NREN, it is only proper to note that there are some reasonably serious concerns about it---its management[23] and its purposes. Some, in fact, might argue that its purposes risk becoming confused. There are those who hope that the kinds of services the network will support might eventually be extended to almost every household in the country, in the way that almost every household is connected to local telephone and electric power infrastructures. In that way all Americans would potentially have access to some subset of the information resources available in databases to be linked to the network. Others argue for a much more limited set of objectives like those described here, a network designed to connect large institutional repositories of information resources---research laboratories, libraries, and so on. Given the projected costs and the involvement of the federal government, resolution of such disagreements is not likely to be easily or rapidly achieved.

TRANSFORMATION OF SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

Our objective in Part 2 was to identify some of the principal pieces of an alternative model of scholarly communication proposed by many observers. That model is the expression of electronic information technologies that permit one to envision entirely different ways of structuring scholarly activity and communicating the results. As suggested earlier, it is difficult to determine precisely where we are in the transition to a new paradigm, although it is clear that the thinking is more advanced about some elements of the alternative model than others. At all major research universities, for example, electronic technologies have been effectively employed in automating the bibliographic record, although at only a few (New York University and the University of Michigan among them) is the retrospective conversion of the existing card catalog complete or nearly so. In addition, in many disciplines though not all there are exceedingly useful abstracting and indexing services providing bibliographic information on the serial literature. The electronic publication of full texts, on the other hand, is a more recent development, and we have yet to settle upon equally well-developed conventions and practices.

Similarly, the central organizational and logistical components of the distributive as contrasted with the self-sufficient model---collaborative collection development and document delivery services---have yet to be adequately considered, although in the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries there is an excellent prototype for the kinds of arrangements that might eventually emerge. In some respects the national telecommunications infrastructure, as an element of the alternative model, is like the automation of the bibliographic record in that we are farther along in its development, in part because of the direct involvement of the federal government.

It is extremely unlikely---we would say almost inconceivable---that any alternative model will completely supplant the existing one at any point in the foreseeable future. Rather, we envision a situation where incremental modifications to the current model will be made. We would also argue, however, that it is equally inconceivable that there will not eventually be a more-or-less complete transformation of scholarly communication. The new technologies are too powerful and their advantages too clear for current practices to continue indefinitely. However one might regard present technological developments, no amount of nostalgic longing for traditional practices, in our view, will serve to forestall the application of the new technologies to scholarly communication, just as Angelo Poliziano's dismissal of printing[24] did not forestall its ascendancy. Manuscripts and printed books coexisted for many decades after the invention of printing, to be sure; eventually, however, print all but supplanted manual copying as the favored means of disseminating information of the type we are concerned with in this study.

Just as print, as contrasted with manual copying, yielded text products and information industries with certain fundamental characteristics of the type described at the beginning of this section---multiple, identical copies of a text, media products whose first copy is relatively costly to produce and whose subsequent copies are produced relatively inexpensively---so electronic technologies, as contrasted with print, yield products with features correspondingly different in kind from those produced by the existing technology. Among others, they are the dynamic quality of texts stored electronically, the capacity for interactivity and creating personalized information products, instantaneous, random access to the text, the dematerialization of the text, which permits almost instantaneous transmission and remote access, the possibility of miniaturization and its implications for storage, and so on.

As we have also tried to suggest, a given technology fits hand-in-glove with economic and legal practices appropriate to it and particular kinds of relationships among the relevant players (print leads to prospective acquisition of library materials in anticipation of readers' needs, for example). New technologies bring new economic and legal practices accordingly, which will have to be completely and carefully rethought. Such issues have been fully addressed and resolved in the culture of print; the new technologies complicate existing practices. That is not to say that such issues are necessarily inherently difficult to resolve; it is rather that many of the elements of the existing model are implicit, and in envisioning alternatives one has to attempt to recognize first principles and anticipate explicitly as many of the ways as possible in which current arrangements must be rethought under different circumstances.

But in saying such issues are not necessarily difficult to resolve, neither do we wish to suggest that anything about the transition to a new model will be easy or that new technologies promise easy solutions to difficult problems. It is rather that some of these developments, in our view, are almost inevitable. The challenge for those participating in the process of scholarly communication is to employ the technologies in a way consistent with fundamental scholarly objectives and practices.