further factor in favour of traditional research is that, in the words of Clifford Stoll, "the cool stuff predates computers". Very little before 1980 has been digitised, disallowing thorough historical research. Somebody will have to go to the trouble of digitising earlier knowledge. Will they take the time? Who will pay for it? Project Gutenberg, begun at the University of Illinois in the 1970s, makes an ambitious and worthy attempt to begin to solve this problem, as it aims to have 10,000 electronic books by the year 2000. However successful, and although some of their digital choices are suspect (Amateur Radio in the UK and Greece, for example) ten thousand books cannot even be considered a good start. Project Gutenberg needs help.

We might also mention here the disadvantage arising from the virtual nature of the boundless Internet library, for there is a serious argument for having a physical library available to research in. For example, as it is currently organized, the Internet does not (yet) allow for true browsing - picking an area of the library that interests you and thumbing through the stacks, books and dusty documents contained therein. It is by this very physical process that researchers often come across material they did not expect to find, and which turns out to be incredibly useful: the 'serendipity principle'. Internet organisation, on the other hand, particularly when it comes to gopher servers, are a librarian's nightmare: haphazard, non-standard, and wholly subject to the whims of local providers (who are not, in almost all cases, librarians). This criticism is less true of the World Wide Web, but even there this difficulty often surfaces.

The standardised classification systems and easy stack access of good libraries is matchless, particularly when backed up by the non-digitised knowledge of the librarian. Clifford Stoll and Theodore Roszak are both careful to note the value of people to researchers, Roszak noting that librarians can quickly point vast numbers of searches for people which "could not have been successful if they had been limited to digitised sources or the key word/Boolean approach". Good librarians think in non-linear ways, and make use of other people in their approaches - something no Internet search can match at present.

Put all this together, and it is clear that traditional methods of research still come out ahead. On-line services provide little real knowledge, and what there is remains uncitable and is often poorly organised. Worst of all, the system devalues information professionals. Much of this will change, and many of these problems will be (and are being) dealt with. For now, however, caution and a healthy and vocal criticism are necessary if the superhighway is to avoid intellectual casualties. Drive, by all means, but stay in the slow lane.

* See The Times Higher Education Supplement , 13 October 1995

Response

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