Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Grainger Engineering Library Symposium [PAGE 23]

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The advent of the Grainger library Information Center which we celebrate this week, is both an advance of these marginal changes and a promise of more dramatic changes in our understanding of what constitutes knowledge, how we organize it. and how we communicate it. It is within our tradition to ask a student to describe the main characteristics of the Italian Renaissance. But what would be the response if a faculty member asked a student to recreate the atmosphere of the Renaissance? Probably much the same as the reaction to the question from the AT&T camera crew. Yet this is precisely the type of challenge that our universities are beginning to face. The ability to routinely combine full-motion video with sound and text will radically change our concept of what constitutes formal knowledge. And we are not prepared to handle most of its implications. The Grainger collections and services will have as their primary mission the support of the teaching and research programs of the College of Engineering. But the Grainger laboratories will serve to prepare the University Library for the future It is here that we will test techniques for storing and retrieving images and sound. It is here that we will experiment with new ways to index and analyze literatures. It is here that we will study the behavior of users to improve methods for manipulating data online from local and remote sources. An ambitious program for research and development of the substantive aspects of the information superhighway will require new resources that are not likely to be available from the university, especially when we realize that most academic components of U.S. universities have received a declining percentage of the educational budget over the past decade. The development of more than limited entertainment options for the coming information superhighway will require a massive and strategic investment in the research and development capabilities of our nation's universities that the Grainger symbolizes today. But that can only happen if we strengthen the partnership

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