Some of the leading projects in electronic information have been led by established faculty in the humanities, but many have been maverick projects with little institutional support. Sometimes junior faculty members have pursued new ideas against the opposition of senior members in their departments. In the mid-1980s, while a junior faculty member in classics at Harvard University, Gregory Crane began work on the project known as Perseus, which uses hyperlinks to relate sources
such as texts and maps with tools such as dictionaries. In particular, Crane aimed to give the general student an appreciation of the poems of the Greek poet Pindar. From this early work has emerged one of the most important digital libraries in the humanities.
The collections now have comprehensive coverage of the classical Greek period and are extending steadily into other periods of Greek history, the Roman period, and beyond. Source materials include texts, in both the original language and in translation, and images of objects, such as vases, and architectural sites. However, perhaps the greatest resource is the effort that has been made in structuring the materials and the database of links between items.
In Perseus, an emphasis on the content has enabled the collections to migrate through several generations of computer system. Classical texts are fairly stable, though new editions may have small changes, and supporting works such as lexicons and atlases have a long life. Therefore, the effort put into acquiring accurate versions of text, marking them up with SGML, and linking them to related works is a long term investment that will outlive any computer system. Perseus has never had more than one programmer on its staff, but relies on the most appropriate computer technology available. It was an early adopter of Apple's Hypercard system, published a high- quality CD-ROM, and quickly moved to the web when it emerged. The only elaborate software that the project has developed are rule-based systems to analyze the morphology of inflected Greek and Latin words.
The long-term impact of Perseus is difficult to predict, but its goals are ambitious. In recent years, academic studies in the humanities have become increasingly esoteric and detached. It is typical of the field that Crane was unable to continue his work at Harvard, because it was not considered serious scholarship; he moved to Tufts University. Perseus may not be Harvard's idea of scholarship but it is certainly not lightweight. The four million words of Greek source texts include most of the commonly cited texts; when there are no suitable images of a vase, Perseus has been know to take a hundred new photographs; the user interface helps the reader with easy access to translations and dictionaries, but has a strong focus on the original materials. Perseus is a treasure trove for the layman and is increasingly being used by researchers as an excellent resource for traditional studies. Hopefully, Perseus's greatest achievement will be to show the general public the fascination of the humanities and to show the humanities scholar that popularity and scholarship can go hand in hand.
The motives of creators and users
Creators
An understanding of how libraries and publishing are changing requires an appreciation of the varied motives that lead people to create materials and others to use them. A common misconception is that people create materials primarily for the fees and royalties that they generate. While many people make their livelihood from the works that they create, other people have different objectives.
Look at the collections in any library; large categories of material were created for reasons where success is measured by the impact on the readers, not by revenue.
Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was written to promulgate ideas; so were Tom Paine's The Rights of Man, Karl Marx's Das Kapital, and St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. Since classical times, books, manuscripts, pictures, musical works and poems were commissioned for personal aggrandizement; many of the world's great buildings, from the pyramids to the Bibliothèque de France, were created because of
an individual's wish to be remembered. Photographs, diaries, poems, and letters may be created simply for the private pleasure of the creator, yet subsequently be important library items. Few activities generate so many fine materials as religion; conversely, few activities create as much of dubious merit. The Christian tradition of fine writing, art, music, and architecture is repeated by religions around the world. The web has large amounts of material that are advertising or promotional, some of which will eventually become part of digital libraries.
The act of creation can be incidental to another activity. A judge who delivers a legal opinion is creating material that will become part of digital libraries. So is a museum curator preparing an exhibition catalog, or a drug researcher filing a patent claim.
Materials are created by government agencies for public use. They range from navigational charts and weather forecasts, to official statistics, treaties, and trade agreements. Many of the materials in libraries were created to provide a record of some events or decisions. They include law reports, parish records, government records, official histories, and wartime photographs. Preserving an official record is an important functions of archives.
People who convert material to digital formats from other media can also be considered creators; conversion activities range from an individual who transcribes a favorite story and mounts it on the web, to projects that convert millions of items. The actual act of creation can even be carried out by a machine, such as images captured by a satellite circling the earth.
A second misconception is that creators and the organizations they work for have the same motives. Some works are created by teams, others by individuals; a feature film must be a team effort, but nobody would want a poem written by a committee. Hence, while some creators are individuals, such as free-lance writers, photographers, or composers, others belong to an organization and the materials that they create are part of the organization's activities. When somebody is employed by an organization, the employer often directs the act of creation and owns the results. This is called a "work for hire". In this case, the motivations of the individual and the organization may be different. A corporation that makes a feature film could be motivated by profit, but the director might see an opportunity to advocate a political opinion, while the leading actress has artistic goals.
Creators whose immediate motive is not financial usually benefit from the widest possible exposure of their work. This creates a tension with their publishers, whose business model is usually to allow access only after payment. Academic journal are an important category of materials where the author's interests can be in direct conflict with those of the publisher. Journal articles combine a record of the author's research with an opportunity to enhance the writer's reputation. Both objectives benefit from broad dissemination. The tension between creators who want wide distribution and the publishers' need for revenue is one of the themes of Chapter 6.
Users
Library users are as varied as creators in their interests and levels of expertise. Urban public libraries serve a particularly diverse group of users. For some people, a library is a source of recreational reading. For others, it acts as an employment center, providing information about job openings, and bus timetables for commuters. The library might provide Internet connections that people use as a source of medical or legal information. It might have audio-tapes of children's stories, and reference materials for local historians, which are used by casual visitors and by experts.
Individuals are different and a specific individual may have different needs at different times. Even when two users have similar needs, their use of the library might be different. One person uses catalogs and indexes extensively, while another relies more on links and citations. Designers of digital libraries must resist the temptation to assume a uniform, specific pattern of use and create a system specifically for that pattern.
Among the diversity of users, some broad categories can be distinguished, most of which apply to both digital libraries and to conventional libraries. One category is that people use libraries for recreation; in digital libraries this sometimes takes the form of unstructured browsing, colloquially known as "surfing". Another common use of a library is to find an introductory description of some subject: an engineer begins the study of a technical area by reading a survey article; before traveling, a tourist looks for information about the countries to be visited. Sometimes a user wants to know a simple fact. What is the wording of the First Amendment? What is the melting point of lead? Who won yesterday's football game? Some of these facts are provided by reference materials, such as maps, encyclopedias and dictionaries, others lie buried deep within the collections. Occasionally, a user wants comprehensive knowledge of a topic: a medical researcher wishes to know every published paper that has information about the effects of a certain drug; a lawyer wishes to know every precedent that might apply to a current case.
In many of these situations, the user does not need specific sources of information.
There will be several library objects that would be satisfactory. For example, in answering a geographic question, there will be many maps and atlases that have the relevant information. Only for comprehensive study of a topic is there less flexibility.
These distinctions are important in considering the economics of information (Chapter 6), since alternative sources of information lead to price competition, and in studying information retrieval (Chapter 10), where comprehensive searching has long been given special importance.
The information professions and change
Librarians and change
As digital information augments and sometimes replaces conventional methods, the information professions are changing. Librarians and publishers, in particular, have different traditions, and it is not surprising that their reactions to change differ. To examine how change affects librarians, it is useful to examine four aspects separately:
library directors, mid-career librarians, the education of young librarians, and the increasing importance in libraries of specialists from other fields, notably computing.
Library directors are under pressure. To be director of a major library used to be a job for life. It provided pleasant work, prestige, and a good salary. The prestige and salary remain, but the work has changed dramatically. Digital libraries offer long-term potential but short-term headaches. Libraries are being squeezed by rising prices across the board. Conservative users demand that none of their conventional services be diminished, while other users want every digital service immediately. Many directors do not receive the support that they deserve from the people to whom they report, whose understanding of the changes in libraries is often weak. Every year a number of prominent directors decide not to spend their working life being buffeted by administrative confusion and resign to find areas where they have more control over their own destiny.
Mid-career librarians find that digital libraries are both an opportunity and a challenge. There is a serious shortage of senior librarians who are comfortable with modern technology. This means that energetic and creative individuals have opportunities. Conversely, people who are not at ease with technology can find that they get left behind. Adapting to technical change is more than an issue of retraining.
Training is important, but it fails if it merely replaces one set of static skills with another. Modern libraries need people who are aware of the changes that are happening around them, inquisitive and open to discover new ideas. Panel 5.4 describes one attempt to educate mid-career librarians, the Ticer summer school run by Tilburg University in the Netherlands.