Where is the Knowledg e? Knowledg e Management, Research and Pedag og y in the Electronic Ag e By Bernard R. Gifford Presentation to The Special Libraries Association 83rd Annual Conference, San Francisco, CA June 10 1992 Abstract Paper presented to the Special Libraries Association, 83rd Annual Conference,San Francisco, Ca., on June 10 1992. Defines, discusses and lauds new technology for research and pedagogy in the electronic age in the near future both nationally and internationally. Gives examples of usage ranging from reconstruction of Dead Sea Scrolls to planning baseball strategy to answering medical questions in Africa. Alerts both teachers and librarians to expect change and maintains that librarians will not be passive consultants but knowledge _ manag�rs. Discusses th_e con�pt that lecturing is an unnatural act and predicts that within next two years automated mstruchonal systems wtll be tmplemented. Says that delay is caused not by lack of machinery but lack of courseware. Discusses limits of present software such as CD-ROM. Advocates networked, digital video for future educational technology, i .e. Computer-Mediated Learning Systems, although concedes that technology cannot meet all instructional needs. I would like to speak to you this afternoon about knowledge and knowledge management. I want to share some of my thoughts about the role that knowledge managers- and that means most of you- will play in coming years, as you assume new roles and forge new alliances in the fields of research and pedagogy. And finally, I want to describe my vision of the next generation of learning systems, and the role that knowledge managers might play in the development of these systems. As many of you know, if you have read any of my columns in the Chronicle of Higher Education, I am a baseball fan. In fact, I have often taken the position that fife is a metaphor for baseball. When I attend baseball games, I witness, in essence, a reshuffling of statistics. For as the wonderful sports writer Roger Angell has said, every time a big league umpire shouts play ball, a host of statistics "swarm and hover above the head of every pitcher, every fielder, every batter, every team, recording every play with an accompanying silent shift of digits."1 Virtually every observer of the American pastime has com­ mented its preoccupation with statistics. Recently, a cultural anthropologist noted that this obsession characterizes "a nation preoccupied with enforcing a vision of community upon a vastly heterogeneous population. What statistics do for baseball, polls and elections do for society at large."2 An article in last Saturday'sNew York Times drove home his point, persuading me that in this political season, America's infatuation with statistics is indeed spilling out of the ballparks. Perhaps you saw the page-one article headlined: "Bush, Asking for Continuity,Sounds Like a Revolutionary." In the article, political analyst Andrew Rosenthal documents the President's "sudden fondness for the oratory of revolution," offering the following data: -14 In seven public appearances this month alone, Mr. Bush used the word "change" or "reform" 188 times. Hespoke of"revolution" 17 times, i ncluding 10 ti mes in one speech at a high school i n Allentown, Pa., a personal record for Mr. Bush in a single address. Mr. Bush has talked about change before, but generally in other countries. In all of 1991 he spoke of"change" 57 times, all but seven times in reference to places like the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, Argentina and Peru.3 Now, all of us here share a fascination with information, and the ways it is collected, interpreted, and used. And so I hope you agree with me that this front page story reflects a revolution in textual analysis that has been brought about by the proliferation of personal computers over the last decade. Not that the statistical analysis of texts is entirely new: we've always had literary bean counters, who have commented on the frequency of particular terms in a Shakespearean text, or in the Bible. Concordances existed long before the age of the personal computer. But today, we can subject a vast range of texts to statistical analysis with the push of a button or the click of a mouse. You can be sure that journalist Rosenthal didn't sit with a stack of speeches and a yellow highlighter, marking every occurrence of the word "revolution." He used a computer to search Presiden­ tial Documents, an electronic compilation of official White House records. Machine-Readable Text One of the things that computers can do better and more efficiently than we humans is count. Let me say that as an educator, I rarely stress the computer's computational capacity; I'm much more excited about the computer as a communication and knowledge-building tool. And by nature, I'm more inclined to networking than nitpicking. But when it comes to analyzing source materials, computa­ tion can yield new insight, detecting patterns that would other­ wise remain beneath the surface. As Avra Michelson of the National Research and Education Network noted in a recent speech, computers can count not on! y words, but also brushstrokes in a Rembrandt painting.4 "Increasingly," she adds, "they can perform pattern recogni­ tion, do semantic analysis, analyze text, and model concepts. And computers can perform these processes faster with a large number of sources in greater precision than scholars who must rely on manual interpretation of data."5 In these ways, computers have radically changed research methods not only in the sciences, but also in the humanities and social sciences - in such diverse fields as religious studies, renaissance music, medieval medicine, and lyric poetry - and efforts are underway to convert paper-based materials in virtu­ ally every field to machine-readable form. The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (fLG),a project for converting the extant ancient texts of classical Greece, is but one example. About 8,000 series of source texts in the humanities have already been converted to machine-readable form.6 Two recent efforts are facilitating the conversion process. First, a project called the Text Encoding Initiative (TEl) is developing guidelines for encoding text. This should allow scholars around the world, working on widely different research projects and using different methodologies - not to mention different hardware and software - to share electronic texts . The second effort is the creation of a new institution, the National Center for Machine-Readable Text in the Humanities. Increasingly, we're seeing non-textual sources converted to electronic formats as well . The American Memory Project -at the Library of Congress has begun a five-year pilot project to convert sources in a variety of media (including not only text, but also sound recordings, still pictures, and early film footage) to machine-readable form. Initially, these sources will be available on CD-ROM, but ultimately they will be digitized, so that they can be distributed over networks and manipulated by users. 7 Let me give you an example of a multimedia archival project that is closer to home. Here in Ohio, at Wayne State University, instructional technology specialist Bob Smith is in the early stages of assembling a very important multimedia archive, documenting the history of African-American education in America. Smith plans to travel all over the country, gathering materials for this project - not only texts, but also photographs, recordings of oral histories, and video footage. All of these sources will be accessible electronically. New Technologies, New Questions Technology is changing not only our research methods, but also the kinds of questions we are posing. In the physics Jab, investigators now routinely tackle prob­ lems that require massive computation and would have been considered unthinkable budget-busters only a few years ago. In the Indians ' dugout, manager Mike Hargrove can now get answers to questions like: how well does Albert Bell bat against left-handed pitchers with two men on base? Or what are the odds that Steve Olden will walk Ricky Henderson in the ninth inning? In the realm of archeology, two Ohio-based scholars who until recently had been denied access to the Dead Sea Scrolls, have been able to reconstruct the historic document, using a desktop computer. Professor Ben Zion Wacholder of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and his graduate student Martin G. Abegg Jr. used a recently published Concordance, which gives information about the location and context of individual words in the Dead Sea Scrolls, to piece together the entire text, phrase by phrase and sentence by sentence.8 Without today's technol ­ ogy, I doubt that they would have undertaken the effort. It would be like cutting and pasting Andrew Rosenthal's notes to patch together President Bush's stump speech! And while I ' m on the subject, my last example of how the computer is changing scholarship is the Bush scrolls : It 's a safe bet that to conduct his research, Rosenthal needed nothing more than a laptop and a modem - or perhaps a CD ROM player. It probably took him relatively little time to access the database of presidential documents and carry out a series of word counts. It's easy to forget that ten years ago, Rosenthal would have had to go about this task differently. He could have counted the words by hand. Or, he might have brought data on a magnetic tape to the campus information center for processing by a professional programmer using a mainframe computer. But it's far more likely that he wouldn't have written the article at all . I ' m not suggesting that the mainframe approach would have struck him as unwieldy. I 'm saying that the word­ count approach probably wouldn't have occurred to him in the first place. As Avra Michelson notes, today's researchers are less likely to rely on programmers to perform their computations. And that changes their approach. She writes: Being directly involved in computing changes one's perspective on the nature of research i tself: the kinds of questions that can be posed, the analytical meth­ odologies that can be used, the types and amount of sources appropriate for analysis, and the form of presentation of the findings.9 The Library -A Work in Progress Now, clearly, all of these developments are changing the nature of the library and the role of librarians and archivists. Today's l ibrary is very much a work in progress . Despite rapid change, it will be years before most l ibraries are fully electronic. Although electronic materials play an i ncreasing role at the Library of Congress, the vast majority of items - nearly 87 percent - are still on paper. The Library now has nearly 100 million items in its total inventory; it reports about 12.5 million records on computer databases.10 But change will come. In time, the Library of Congress will be a virtual library -a vast electronic network that will give users access to multiple information sources i n all possible media, ideally by means of multifunctional workstations located inside or outside the library's physical plant. I was fascinated to learn, by the way, that the Library of Congress is taking steps to turn itself not only into a virtual library, but also into a "virtual reality library." The Chronicle of Higher Education reported earlier this month that the National Demonstration Lab for Interactive Information Technologies 15 - (the new computer center set up last month at the Library of Congress), is consulting with the Council on Library Resources about simulating itself in "virtual reality" - the interactive technology that lets you "enter" a computer environment. That would be quite an experience for us die-hard browsers. We could virtually "walk" through the stacks, taking books off shelves to peruse their contents or leafing through journals - without ever leaving our offices.11 I said a moment ago that today's library is a work in progress. I might add that today's librarians and archivists are works in progress as well. For one thing, the distinction between the two professions is beginning to blur. Traditionally, a key difference has been that archivists work with unique material, and librarians with materials that are available in multiple forms. But as more and more texts are converted to electronic formats for storage and dissemination, that distinction loses meaning.12 The archivist's role is changing in another sense as well. Archivists have generally been concerned with materials that no longer have a useful life within the organization in which they were created. Usually, materials are at least 30 years old by the time they are excreted from an organization and entrusted to archivists. But as we store increasing numbers of materials in digital formats, there is growing need for archivists to move from custodianship of records to direct involvement in system.design, so that as new materials are acquired, they are preserved in a format that safeguards the integrity of the record while allowing access to it. Access and Equity I have read and heard many different views of how tomor­ row's libraries and archives will evolve, but everyone seems to agree on one point: access to information, rather than ownership of information, will be the measure of a research facility. Equal access to information resources is becoming a major issue on campuses across the nation, and in political bodies as well. After all, information is power in today's world, and the impulse to limit access to information has been very strong in Academia, as in other parts of our society. The struggle over the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls is a great example. The research l ibrary cannot continue to be an institution that caters exclusively to the well informed. Too often, today 's library is seen as an information warehouse open only to those who are already familiar with its culture and its rituals. If this persists, our libraries will serve a smaller and smaller segment of the American people. Our l ibraries must also meet the needs of the uninformed and the misinformed. Knowledge managers have an important role to play in providing access to information to those who need it most, including potential users in the developing world. We cannot be content to provide infom1ation at an ever faster rate to those who already have access to vast stores of data. It is not enough to use technology to enrich lives. Whenever possible, we must use it to ,save lives as well. In the last year, I've begun to speak of a challenge facing those of us who specialize in knowledge management: we must make the world "safe for intelligence." - Ul By that, I mean that we must create a world where our tremendous intellectual, informational, and technological re­ sources can make a difference - improving the quality of life for all of us who share this planet. Thanks to electronic networks, health workers in industrial­ ized countries, have rapid access to the most recent research findings. They can use personal �mputers in their offices and clinics to get detailed, specific information about diagnosis, treatment and drug trials. For example, AIDS doctors can pin­ point the information they need using CD ROM discs that hold a l ibrary of virtually all of the most up-to-date AIDS literature in one compact source. Just imagine what these tools could mean to the beleaguered medical workers- both urban caregivers and bush doctors - in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. With recent advances in wireless communication, these connections will be more feasible. Motorola is talking about sending up satellites to serve as revolving antennas for parts of the world that have poor telecommunications infrastructures. Imagine a world where sat­ ellites can beam answers to urgent questions posed by a parasi­ tologist in Zaire, a teacher in Somalia, or a farmer in Uruguay! Pointers and Retrievers Of course, day to day most of us are more involved in issues of local access than global dissemination. Providing local access means not only creating electronic resources and networks, but also giving a broad range of people the know-how they need to access those resources and those networks . Both efforts are critical; but they compete for scarce dollars . As a result, we 're hearing a great deal of debate about priorities . Some argue that until more patrons are computer-literate, libraries need to invest heavily in instruction and assistance. At James Madison University, for example, technical services staff have been shifted to public services to meet patrons ' growing need for help negotiating electronic databases. Others, like Kenneth Dowlin, City Librarian for San Fran­ cisco, stress the need for librarians "to move from pointers and retrievers to facilitators and organizers," shifting human re­ sources from "the end ofthe stream, which helps the patrons find books, to the front line, which will organize information so that they can find it themselves. " 13 Of course, librarians need to do both: first they have to confuse users by converting materials to electronic form, and then they have to help them access those materials. Dowlin speaks of pointers and retrievers; to the computerphobic, today's librarians might seem to be a new breed- something like a cross between a pit bull and a St. Bernard. First you scare the daylights out of the patron, and then you offer first-aid and comfort. But seriously, Dowlin makes an important point, and he is not alone. As we move toward the virtual library, librarians will not be passive consultants. They will assume the very active role of knowledge manager. Richard Lucier of the University of Cali­ fornia at San Francisco, draws the distinction in this way: "What is remarkably different about the knowledge management role is that it insinuates the library at the beginning of the information · transfer cycle rather than at the end and focuses on information capture rather than access and use.14 Lucier's own work exemplifies the changing role of the librarian. As you may know, before going to UCSF, Lucier worked at Johns Hopkins, where he directed a multidisciplinary team of librarians and information specialists, software engi­ neers, content specialists, and social scientists - including an anthropologist. This team collaborated with scientists and schol­ ars on the Human Genome Project, creating specialized databases and electronic tools for the project, and assuring that the construction of this complex knowledge base, and the documen­ tation of that process, would go hand in hand. This project is an important example of how knowledge management is revolu­ tionizing the relationship between researchers and librarians. The Heart of the Library Before going any further, I want to acknowledge that one of our most thoughtful writers on knowledge management is right here at Case Western Reserve. Kaye Gapen, Director of the University Libraries, defines knowledge management as : [the) means by which librarians can help scholars and universities retain control of the intellectually-gener­ ated property that is their most precious and valuable commodity. It is a way of structuring new works as they are created, so that they are maximally accessible and a way of accessing existing resources to enable the highest level of integration with the scholar's work, helping to create new knowledge. 15 Gapen urges us to look at tomorrow's library from a different perspective. As we envision the virtual library, she argues, our first step is usually to try to understand the technologies that we hope to bring together; then, from our standpoint inside the technology, we take a look at the people who will use it. She calls this the "view from the outside in." It is the wrong view, Gapen argues, because the "heart of the library, the pulsing purpose which has comprised the library's mission, has been something else altogether . . . " She identifies that "something else" by quoting Jesse Shera, who wrote 20 years ago that the mission of the library is to "bring together human beings and recorded knowledge in as fruitful a relation­ ship" as is humanly possible.16 Gapen says that as we move toward the virtual library, it is not enough to build a technological infrastructure. We must lay an intellectual foundation as well, rethinking what it takes to bring together human beings and recorded knowledge. As Jesse Shera wrote, the basic problem in librarianship is to "match two patterns -the pattern of human thought to the pattern of organization of the library." As we apply new technologies to the creation, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge, Gapen challenges us to do nothing less than to reconsider what it means to learn - as an individual process and a social process. In this sense, I have found a kindred spirit in your university's library director, because I have been delivering a very similar message as I 've traveled to campuses across the nation. The Learning Society For the last several years, I have been encouraging people to envision our society as a total learning environment - what I call the Learning Society. The idea is to recognize learning as a normal, necessary part of being alive rather than a specialized activity tied to the classroom. In the Learning Society, modem technologies are harnessed to free up the way we learn, so that learning can go on at any time, at any place, on any topic, and in any sequence. Today, human knowledge roughly doubles each year, and the shelflife of expertise grows shorter each day. We hear a great deal about the information explosion - the astonishing increase in our ability to collect and process data, and the resulting bombardment of people and institutions by massive quantities of information. I have urged a shift in emphasis away from the information explosion, to a learning explosion, in which we burst the normal confines of how we think about learning as bound to fixed places, times, subjects and sequencing. To ignite the learning explosion, we need to rework not only our libraries, but virtually all of our institutions, so that they promote rather than discourage continuous, collaborative learn­ ing. In the terms outlined by Gapen and Shera, we must create organizations whose structures and communication patterns are aligned with the thought processes and learning styles of the people they bring together. Because until we do, advances in information technology - no matter how swift-will not bring about equally dramatic increases in productivity. Information and Knowledge Gapen draws an important distinction between information and knowledge. Citing Shera, she says that information becomes knowledge only when you have "processed through your own value system, related it to your own image and perhaps changed your image of the world, as a consequence of it.17 The kind of learning that is most important to us in higher education is, in fact, this process of transforming information into knowledge. It is the process of meaning-construction. And in view of the information explosion, no challenge is as urgent today as helping students find meaning in the flood of data that threatens to overwhelm them. Unless we meet this challenge, we shall be forced to ask, as T.S. Eliot did decades ago: Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge ? Where is the knowledge we have lost ill information ?18 I believe that the knowledge we have lost in information can be reclaimed at a very particular location - the juncture where librarianship meets pedagogy. Knowledge Management and Pedagogy In discussing the changing role of the librarian, I spoke earlier about the need for greater collaboration, throughout the life of a project, between librarians and researchers. 17 - Let me now add that we need more collaboration between librarians and teachers - and not only in making course materials available. As knowledge managers, librarians need to be involved in the design and development of curricula, particu­ larly interdisciplinary curricula. We are beginning to see this happen. A case in point is the Synthesis Coalition Project. Barbara von Wahlde of SUNY­ Buffalo writes that like the Human Genome Project, it "involves librarians as team members in the development of a complex knowledge base," but in this case the goal is developing a "multimedia database of curricular materials, ranging from sim­ ple text to full-motion video, connected to courseware develop­ ment studios and hightechnology classrooms.19 My message to the librarians among you is: Expect change. In coming years, as you assume the role of knowledge managers, you will be increasingly involved in instruction - the develop­ ment of instructional strategies and materials, as well as active participation with students and teachers in learning activities. But I am also saying to the teachers among you: Expect change. Pedagogy in higher education is not all it should be. The lecture format is quickly becoming obsolete. In coming years, you will be working closely with knowledge managers to help your students learn how to learn, that is, how to access informa­ tion and do the meaning-construction work needed to transform information into knowledge. As we revolutionize knowledge management in higher edu­ cation, we will also need to transform teaching. In the last few yt