The topic of dissemination proper emerged at various points during the
Workshop. At the session devoted to national and international computer
networks, LYNCH, Howard BESSER, Ronald LARSEN, and Edwin BROWNRIGG
highlighted the virtues of Internet today and of the network that will
evolve from Internet. Listeners could discern in these narratives a
vision of an information democracy in which millions of citizens freely
find and use what they need. LYNCH noted that a lack of standards
inhibits disseminating multimedia on the network, a topic also discussed
by BESSER. LARSEN addressed the issues of network scalability and
modularity and commented upon the difficulty of anticipating the effects
of growth in orders of magnitude. BROWNRIGG talked about the ability of
packet radio to provide certain links in a network without the need for
wiring. However, the presenters also called attention to the
shortcomings and incongruities of present-day computer networks. For
example: 1) Network use is growing dramatically, but much network
traffic consists of personal communication (E-mail). 2) Large bodies of
information are available, but a user's ability to search across their
entirety is limited. 3) There are significant resources for science and
technology, but few network sources provide content in the humanities.
4) Machine-readable texts are commonplace, but the capability of the
system to deal with images (let alone other media formats) lags behind.
A glimpse of a multimedia future for networks, however, was provided by
Maria LEBRON in her overview of the Online Journal of Current Clinical
Trials (OJCCT), and the process of scholarly publishing on-line.
The contrasting form of the CD-ROM disk was never systematically
analyzed, but attendees could glean an impression from several of the
show-and-tell presentations. The Perseus and American Memory examples
demonstrated recently published disks, while the descriptions of the
IBYCUS version of the Papers of George Washington and Chadwyck-Healey's
Patrologia Latina Database (PLD) told of disks to come. According to
Eric CALALUCA, PLD's principal focus has been on converting Jacques-Paul
Migne's definitive collection of Latin texts to machine-readable form.
Although everyone could share the network advocates' enthusiasm for an
on-line future, the possibility of rolling up one's sleeves for a session
with a CD-ROM containing both textual materials and a powerful retrieval
engine made the disk seem an appealing vessel indeed. The overall
discussion suggested that the transition from CD-ROM to on-line networked
access may prove far slower and more difficult than has been anticipated.