Wendy Lougee (John Price-Wilkin is assisting her with the online examples that are displayed on the screen behind them): While John sets up here, I feel compelled to make two points. One is we are actually going to use the Internet for this presentation, and secondly, what you will be seeing is a taste of some of what Vint Cerf referred to as "the dark information." We just did a quick calculation. We have here at Michigan about eight million pages or so of text in digital form. That represents close to 2 percent of the light side of the Internet, so a significant body of information.

I also feel compelled at the start to make some definitional statement. Too often, people think of the Internet as a digital library, that vast resource of information. But today I want to focus on the kind of functions that traditional libraries have always played; that is, an entity that selects information, provides intellectual access to it, cares about how the information is mediated with users and also worries about its enduring qualities. Will the information be here 10 years from now?

While we're talking about traditional functions, I think it is also the case that digital technologies allow transformation to occur, not only in what we think of as a library, but I hope it will be evident that we have also transformed what the scholar can do.

What John and I will be doing is taking you through some real interactions with digital content, four vignettes of types of material.

Let's start with the oldest collections here at Michigan. We have one of the largest collections of papyri in the western hemisphere. This is a collection of about 10,000 pieces of papyri that range in age from 1000 BC to 1000 A.D. Everything from decrees of emperors to medicinal recipes to letters These materials are obviously extremely fragile. They are very old, and in the past each papyrus fragment has been assigned to a particular scholar, so that he or she would analyze and publish it and then it would be available in the published medium. So we had a very insular kind of activity that went on in the past with restrictions on access.

What we've been able to do, though, is to provide greater access and new tools for the researcher beyond the microscope that you see in this picture. In addition to the fragility, these fragments are often cumbersome and not easily handled or shared, as you can see (in this picture of a 6-foot papyrus from a notary public, affectionately called Bigfoot). The zooming technology we have employed creates the ability to penetrate into a piece of papyri. You can look at the text very close up and then isolate, grab pieces to look at very, very closely. Here, a tiny, tiny segment.

Now, of course, not everybody reads Greek, so we've provided an interface to allow the general user on the Internet to make use of these collections. At the top you see a little description of this particular piece of papyri. On the left, you see its English translation and then on the right you can see it in Greek. This example from the third century is interesting because it gives you a sense of the diversity of the material. It is a letter from a man by the name of Paniskos. He's traveling, and he writes to his wife, saying, "A battle is coming. Please bring me my helmet, my shield - the good one - also, would you bring me six jars of olives, some honey, and bring your good jewelry, but don't wear it on the boat." There are some things that never change.

In addition to the work we're doing here with papyrus, we have a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to bring together the large papyri collections elsewhere. These other organizations are similarly digitizing their information, and we can create a virtual collection of papyri that creates a very comprehensive picture of the eastern Mediterranean at the time.

Now let's move on to a quick tour of a different kind of information, examples of visual resources. First of all, a 19th century oil painting from the National Museum of American Art. Next, a photograph from that same collection. Here's a Monet from the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and also a chair from their Ima Hogg Collection. A lithograph and sheet music from the Library of Congress and, finally, a seventh century Peruvian bottle from the UCLA collection of cultural history.

I hope that quick tour illustrated two things. First of all, when we're talking about these types of collections, they are geographically distributed. And each of the curators of those collections thinks of the information and manages it in different ways. So, for example, the vocabulary that they use to describe a work of art or furniture or photographs differs, partly because of their own management techniques, but also because of the nature of the objects. We might refer to the creator of each of these quite differently - from painter to photographer to artisan - so the challenge here is to look at how to create a seamless whole or to "federate," if you will, the resources of these collections - it is both a challenge of the physical distribution as well as the intellectual access.

This represents a new role for libraries to think about not just amassing local collections but rather how to bring together an intellectual, coherent collection from physically distributed collections.
Here, too, we have created specialized tools, for example, tools for searching and displaying multiple works. We've pulled up here a search on the works of Picasso. If you've ever been in a fine art course, it is not uncommon for the presenter to use two slide projectors in order to compare works of art. So here on the left of the interface, we can show a 1907 Picasso and on the right a 1937 work, to show the maturation of his style. Here, unlike the general Internet distribution approach we have taken with the papyrus, we frequently have to deal with issues of rights. The museum community is, understandably, very concerned about protecting its rights and the rights to this information, so licensing of content and security become incredibly important.

Moving on to a third type of information, cultural heritage. Here we have the stuff and substance found in most of our libraries and archives, the books and the journals and the special collections that represent the common voice of our heritage. Here, too, we have the ability to look at new ways of delivering content and to create a democratizing set of resources on the Internet, where everyone can have access to these materials.

We'll look first at a project under way here by Professor Julie Ellison in English. She's interested in what she calls the "common voice." We'll search for some collections of the Bentley Historical Library and pull up a diary of a 19th century young girl living in rural Michigan. As you can see in this handwritten diary, she first learns her handwriting and experiments with that and then copies some poetry and then eventually, towards the end when she's in her teenage years, she is actually writing her own poetry. Professor Ellison talks about the importance of being able to make an emotional linkage, the sort of bringing the student through the digital object to the real thing.

Another project in this domain, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is the Making of America project, in which we have converted 19th century American books and journals. Here we've added to the page images the ability to actually search the full text. As an example, we're going to search for the word "suicide" and "law." And we actually have turned up quite a significant body of 19th century material in the popular press dealing with assisted suicide. It turns out that this particular piece John is showing was written in 1896. It is a science fiction piece talking about the legalization of assisted suicide in 1996. When Professor Yale Commissar in the law school found out about this, he was astonished. It was a body of literature he didn't know existed. It also has some remarkably similar arguments about the pursuit of happiness that are being talked about in current-day discussions about assisted suicide.

Within this collection, we can get at a variety of types of information. Here we have a geographic description of travels and political cartoons. Here we have a rather unflattering picture of Jefferson Davis. These kinds of things would never appear in the traditional indexing media in libraries, so it is a marvelous way to get at information that would never be possible before.

One last project in this domain, also funded by the Mellon Foundation, is called JSTOR, which stands for "journal storage." Through JSTOR, the entire back volumes of core journals in all subjects are being converted. As an example, we can search for the words "George C. Marshall," anywhere in all of the articles of 50 or so journals, and pull up hundreds of items and eventually then go to the exact page. This particular example describes his work related to women in the military.

These types of resources and access really create a democratizing force, letting everyone have access to these materials that, heretofore, were only available to local scholars. And it also is, in a way, forecasting the changes we will see as publishers change current methods for distributing information. Almost every publisher is reeling with the opportunity of thinking about disseminating their publications through the Internet and Web technologies. Publishers are also is reconceiving what they can do, reconceiving the conventions that they have previously held near and dear.

If you think about it, for example, a traditional scholarly journal has articles that are aggregated into issues, that are aggregated into volumes, that are aggregated into subscriptions. But in a digital environment, are those containers, those physical containers, necessary? Could we, rather, look at very different ways of delivering the information and also different ways of pricing the content (that is, other than subscriptions)?

That very question is being looked at in a project here called PEAK, which stands for Pricing Electronic Access to Knowledge. We are partnering with the large publisher Elsevier Science and delivering 1,100 journals to a community of 12 institutions that are receiving different pricing conditions and different products. In searching PEAK, a user can access all the article text for all 1,100 journals and pull up, for example, the word "collaboratory." If you think about it, that word hasn't hit the regular dictionary circuit in terms of indexing, so these new access capabilities provide a marvelous way of getting at terminology that is very cutting edge. In this example, we have found the word "collaboratory" within the bibliography of the article.

Although these examples are from digital library activity at the University of Michigan, there are many, many more projects under way elsewhere. Almost every major research library has launched initiatives in digital content, and we're seeing a great deal of global activity in trying to create a worldwide, virtual and coherent framework for information and information access. All of these projects have several themes in common. There's certainly this notion of federating electronic content, this new role of taking the concept of "library" and extending into a far broader arena, and certainly adding value in terms of access to information, and also adding life in terms of long-term access.

In addition, we are creating new genre. Previously static information can now be dynamically linked with other things. Contentions whereby text is meant to be read in a linear fashion are disappearing. And finally, digital libraries are creating building blocks for collaboratories, the sort of departmental library of the future that can be incorporated in the kind of collaboratory environment of communication and collaboration tools we'll hear about shortly. Thank you.