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.”
Herbert Charles Morton, Anne J. Price, and
Robert Cameron Mitchell, The ACLS Survey of Scholars: Final Reportof Views on Publications, Computers, and Libraries (Lanham, MD:
University Press of America, 1989).
In 1988 RLG published a detailed assessment
of information needs in the humanities and social sciences.
Constance Gould, Information Needs in the
Humanities: An Assessment (Mountain View, CA: Research LibrariesGroup, 1988).
The responses of the humanists interviewed were
consistent across disciplines: they wanted more machine-readablecatalogs, indexes, and other finding aids. There was little
interest in making full texts available in digital form, partlybecause the technology was new and untested, but also because
scholars were accustomed to the informal, book-based, and oftenserendipitous browsing methods of research that had been
fundamental to humanities scholarship for centuries. Imagedatabases for two- and three-dimensional objects were largely
beyond the capacities of the technology― and the budgets―of thetime.
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.
Pamela Pavliscak, Seamus Ross, and Charles
Henry, “Information Technology in Humanities Scholarship:Achievements, Prospects, and Challenges—The United States Focus”.
(New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1997). ACLSOccasional Paper No. 37
(External Link) .
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
offers more than 250 online,
full-text contemporary journals in the humanities, arts, and socialsciences. The journals can be searched by keywords, and the reader
can follow links to relevant footnotes and other related journalarticles. JSTOR
(an abbreviated designation for
Journal Storage) is a large archive of older publications, someextending back a hundred years. Currently JSTOR contains 614
journals from 375 publishers, with more than fourteen millionpages. Another project, ARTStor,
modeled on JSTOR, focuses on
art images drawn from many time periods and cultures. ARTStor holdshundreds of thousands of images contributed by museums,
archeological teams, and photo archives, as well as tools andindexes that facilitate productive use of this vast collection.
InteLex Past Masters
is a large dataset of full
texts, usually in the form of complete works of major thinkers inthe social sciences—particularly economics, political thought and
theory, and sociology. Social scientists and students often turn tothis Web site for trusted editions of, for example, Charles Darwin,
Herbert Spencer, or Adam Smith. For authors who wrote in languagesother than English, an English translation is provided. Cogprints
is often the first place
scholars go for information pertinent to the study of cognition:psychology, anthropology, and other social sciences that include
elements of cognitive study are represented by a wealth ofdigitized research.