ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


718 /  C&RL News

EDUCOM  stimulates librarians’ imaginations

Kenneth King, president of EDUCOM , led off 
the 1991 annual conference, “Curricula, Comput­
ing, and Culture,” by supposedly quoting Yogi 
Berra: “I f  the road forks, take it.” Perhaps that was 
a metaphor for the 2,200 computing specialists, 
librarians, and faculty members attending the 
EDUCOM  ’91 conference held in San Diego, 
October 16-19. Each o f these groups of profession­
als has its own expertise, yet all are proceeding 
towards a common goal of making best use of 
electronic technology in colleges and universities.

Each year more librarians find themselves using 
technology in cooperation with faculty and comput­
ing specialists in order to improve teaching, re­
search, and learning on their campuses. Although 
still a minority as a group, some librarians find that 
participation in an EDUCOM  conference helps 
bring their paths into contact with other informa­
tion service professionals in a collaborative atmo­
sphere.

EDUCOM , a non-profit organization compris­
ing about 600 colleges and universities, is con­
cerned with “increasing individual and institutional 
intellectual productivity through access to and use 
o f information resources and technology.”

A typical day at EDUCOM  '91 consisted o f an 
8:00 a.m. general session, one or two sets of concur­
rent sessions, atightly scheduled “in-house” served 
luncheon and program or a box lunch to be taken to 
the hotel gardens, and afternoon choices o f field 
trips, birds o f a feather sessions, or special interest 
group meetings. Exhibits opened after lunch and 
ran until 6:00 or into the early evening depending 
upon the day.

Vendors provided more than just exhibits and 
help sessions in their suites. Apple provided several 
dozen Macintosh machines in the convention cen­
ter and the conference hotel and Digital Equip­
ment Company provided networking and a link to 
the Internet. Conference goers could use the 
Internet to communicate with their offices and 
other locations via electronic mail. In fact, an early 
draft of a portion of this article was sent directly 
from the conference to the editor o f C ollege an d 
R esearch L ib raries News for a critique. The same 
system also served as a conference message board.

Field trips this year included the Scripps Institu­
tion of Oceanography, the San Diego Super Com­
puter Center, the Salk Institute, the General Atom­
ics’ Fusion Facility and its Robotics System, and 
area universities. Evenings were highlighted with 
all conference receptions the first two nights and, 
for an added fee, excursions. For those wishing to

spend their evenings at the conference, many ven­
dors had staff available in suites to help registrants 
with ideas for new technical applications or the 
refinement o f current ones. F  or those whose minds 
were beginning to “max out,” a free multimedia 
concert of electronic and acoustical music was 
performed one evening. Not only was the program 
entertaining, but it was a part of a music course 
developed and taught at the University o f Southern 
California by the three performers.

Many of the presentations and exhibits featured 
specialized materials for college and university 
courses and broad, sophisticated information ser­
vices for students and faculty. The latter included 
some really innovative systems of access to the 
library and other information sources.

During a preconference session, Dr. Joseph 
Henderson and Dr. Robert Brentrup, both of 
Dartmouth College, spoke on multimedia and net­
working to an overflow (and over-registered) audi­
ence. Just a tour of their “star wars” array of 
computers, monitors, video recorders, electronic 
switches, phone lines, projectors, etc., used for the 
one day session was nearly worth the price of 
admission— and most o f it worked!

Henderson presented his interactive media da­
tabase program for training medical personnel that 
showed fascinating ways to use information (text, 
motion, and sound) in an interactive manner. It 
certainly stimulated the imagination of those in 
attendance who weren’t worn out from watching all 
the equipment in use.

Brentrup demonstrated Dartmouth's graphic 
user interface (GUI) as a front end to its library 
catalog. Dartmouth built its own automated library 
system by elaborating on the B. R. S. database 
engine and then designing its own screens and 
interfaces. Using this GUI, patrons are able to 
create searches in the library catalog by using a 
mouse and windows just as one would on a Macin­
tosh, an IBM  machine which utilizes Windows 3.O., 
or on a NeXT machine. In fact, the GUI used at 
Dartmouth is Macintosh-based, although the sys­
tem can be accessed by other micros and even by 
dumb terminals (without the GUI in the latter case, 
though).

Patrons can use any micro and the same termi­
nals and the same search methods to search many 
other databases and various information sources on 
Dartmouth’s campus. For example, Dartmouth has 
a large collection of Shakespeare’s plays; 33 of his 
plays are available in full text and with full indexing 
across the campus electronic information network.



December 1991 / 719

Thus, students can not only gain access to these texts 
from anywhere on campus, or by dialing-in from off 
campus, but can perform textual searches of the 
plays through controlled vocabulary and free word 
searching. Similarly, Dartmouth’s commentaries 
on Dante’s Divine Comedy will be put on the 
network in a hypercard format in the near future.

Dartmouth maintains a very large file of statisti­
cal information. Students interested in using these 
statistics can not only download portions of a data­
base, but also apply these data against the Statistical 
Package for the Social Sciences and run their own 
tests. Dartmouth and Middlebury College share a 
license to use the MLA Bibliography online over 
their own networks.

Want to see the yearbook photo of a student? 
With scanning technology, Dartmouth could place 
each student’s photo on the network. However, due 
to unrestricted access to Dartmouth’s information 
system via the Internet, the university has to decide 
on the privacy question. I f  the system is activated, 
a faculty member who cannot recall a student’s face 
could use the network to provide the image of that 
student. Images from Baker Library (portraits, build­
ing layouts, etc.), as well as many other images from 
the college’s files, can also be distributed across the 
network.

In closing, Brentrup revealed that Dartmouth is 
close to being able to send, on a limited basis, full 
motion video across the network. These would be 
short files and might utilize only a fourth of the 
screen in order to reduce the number of pixels 
supported. Most of us have been limited to seeing 
static information on our micros. The possibilities of 
seeing dynamic images, such as the results o f mo­
lecular experiments, right on the screen of the 
micro boggle the imagination.

Denise Troll of Carnegie Mellon University spoke 
on “expanding the boundaries of the library’s cata­
log.” Carnegie Mellon is in the second phase of 
Project Mercury, its campuswide information sys­
tem which includes the monographic database of 
the library, the CMU journal holdings, a collection 
of archival pictures, periodical and newspaper ab­
stracts, and various commercial databases. Full text 
databases include the campus information direc­
tory, selected encyclopedias and dictionaries, and a 
business dateline. Sometimes the whole is greater 
than the parts. The CMU system even has links from 
the bibliographic database to a full-text database or 
an image database. For example, there is an ISBN 
link from Choice reviews online to the library cata­
log so the user reading a Choice review can deter­
mine if CMU has the book. For items not held, an 
interlibrary loan request can be initiated from the 
patron’s micro.

Vanderbilt University has files of clippings, pam­
phlets, and specialized educational materials avail­
able online. Brief subject descriptors as well as

author and title entries make the material search­
able across the network with full-text images avail­
able to the user.

Ronald Kalinoski of Syracuse University pre­
sented examples of the audio and video images that 
Syracuse is placing on the University Network and 
hopes to place on the high speed National Research 
and Education Network (NREN) in the future. The 
Syracuse database will consist of several million 
digitized sound recordings, all described in MARC 
format. These are not just bibliographic records, 
but actual digitized sound recordings available over 
the network. In many cases the liner notes, record 
jacket, or even the label itself have been scanned 
and are available as part of the database. Those 
attending this session were not only able to hear 
classic jazz recordings from early in the century, but 
to see the images that were packaged with the 
recording and to read any associated text—all over 
the campus network and later over NREN. I f  you 
have ever wondered what the NREN can do for you 
and your country, or if you have ever had trouble 
grasping exactly what multimedia means, this project 
answers those questions.

Each year EDUCOM gives awards to outstand­
ing achievements in the use of information technol­
ogy. Many of them this year went to multimedia 
programs. One of the awards went to a four person 
instructional team from Penn State University that 
designed a multimedia program to help students 
better understand Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Stu­
dents can use a mouse to click on buttons and move 
from the text of a speech to the text of a newspaper 
file covering the speech and on to a video recording 
of an ABC network news telecast of the speech. 
Included also are a collection of maps and other still 
images, texts of relevant laws and historic docu­
ments, biographical information, historical data, 
etc., all of which make for almost encyclopedic 
coverage of Dr. King.

The Penn State program, along with most of the 
others covered above, were developed by teams 
representing various disciplines and campus offices 
in a general systems approach to problem solving. 
In King’s apocryphal story about Yogi Berra, Berra 
would have found the main road (the solution to an 
educational objective in our metaphor) but only by 
walking some distance on each specialist’s path. 
EDUCOM is an opportunity for librarians, com­
puting specialists, and faculty to come together to 
share the results of their common travels in search 
of teaching excellence.

I f  you wish to get to EDUCOM ’92, you should 
mark your calendar for a trip to Baltimore and 
Johns Hopkins University for October 28-31, 
1992. Basic registration this year was $350, so 
plan early if you need support.— Willis M. Hubbard, 
College Librarian, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, 
PA ■ ■