0.9 Decades of accelerating change

Decades of accelerating change

The recent transition to an Internet culture is documented by a series of surveys and reports by the AmericanCouncil of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Research Libraries Group (RLG). In the mid-1980s, the ACLS surveyed almost fourthousand scholars in the humanities and social sciences to learn what they “think about a wide range of issues of greatest concernto their careers, their disciplines, and higher education in general.” The survey’s first finding was the “rapid increase incomputer use.” “In 1980,” the report notes, only “about 2 percent of all respondents either owned a computer or had one on loan fortheir exclusive use.” But by 1985, it observes with obvious excitement, “the number was 45 percent, most of whom used it notonly for routine word processing but for other purposes as well.” Those “other purposes” were, however, clearly minority pursuits.Only about one in five scholars reported using online library catalogs or databases; only one in ten used e-mail; just 7 percent(most of them in classics or linguistics) said that they had used a computer for “theme, text, semantic, or language analysis.”

In 1988 RLG published a detailed assessment of information needs in the humanities and social sciences.

The RLG report showed the social sciences to be more dependent on technology than were the humanities; almostevery social science discipline in 1988 had a trusted machine-readable index associated with scholarship and research inthe relevant academic fields. The social sciences were interested in the availability of electronic databases and datasets forresearch support; for example, the census and Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) materials werealready well established in several disciplines. Scholars in the social sciences also expressed interest in using technology toimprove access to conference papers, unpublished research, and technical reports.

In 1997 the ACLS issued a study focusing on information technology in the humanities.

The findings and recommendations of the 1988 RLG report seemed almost quaint to those scholars interviewed lessthan a decade later, underscoring revolutionary advances in information technology now taken for granted. Almost every scholarregards a computer as basic equipment. Information is increasingly created and delivered in electronic form. E-mail and instantmessaging have broadened circles of communication and increased the amount and, arguably, the quality of debate among dispersedscholarly communities. These changes were the result of the availability and usefulness of first-generationcyberinfrastructure.

Networked access to information sources in the humanities and social sciences has increased dramatically in recentyears, largely because of the widespread adoption of the Web as a kind of first-generation, all-purpose cyberinfrastructure. Throughthe Web, Project MUSE