Volume 4, Issue 2, Winter 2001

Erasing the Barrier between Minds: Freeing Information, Integrating Knowledge
Suzie Allard

"Nam et ipsa scientia potesta est (Knowledge is power)" -- Francis Bacon, "De Haeresibus," Meditationes Sacrae, 1597.

"Information wants to be free" -- a common saying among "web-heads", 1999.

These two sentiments from very different times, and very different social viewpoints, have something in common -- they were each made at a time when society was responding to a dynamic information environment. The comparison is worthwhile, but to set aside contention let's quickly note the substantial differences between these statements, starting with the fact that one discusses knowledge and the other information, which are related but not synonymous concepts. Additionally, Bacon, by virtue of his education and social standing, was a man set apart from most of the people of his day, while the individuals in our web culture of today are far more likely to reflect a broader cross-section of society.

However, it is still interesting to note the broad similarities. Bacon was observing a world impacted by the advent of the printing press nearly 150 years before (Barnes-Svarney, 1995, 530). In the intervening years, the very character of information changed -- information in the form of the printed word had become available to more than a few privileged people and it flowed more easily than ever across national borders.

The quote from today is more anecdotal. Yet it reflects an attitude that is observable in today's information frontier, which is characterized by an ever growing quantity of readily accessible information originating from all corners of the world as evidenced by the World Wide Web. The foundation for this increased information accessibility is the way people are making use of enhanced technology; similar to the way individuals in the 16th century exploited the press. Today's development has been rapid and dynamic. In fact, the final decades of the 20th century have seen some of the most rapid technological development in history thanks to the work of scientists such as Hollerith, Eckert, Manley, Turing and Von Neumann (Crystal 1997, 273).

The World Wide Web provides an example of the growth that can be experienced by a technologically-based information resource. In 1993 the Web had about 100 sites (Schneider & Gersting 1998, 590); as of March 1998 it was estimated that there were nearly 320 million publicly accessible sites (What a massive 1998). The reach of technology is growing in society. Some examples of technology's increased presence include: (1) from 1984 to 1997 computer sales in the U.S. have nearly tripled (Famighetti 1997, 650); (2) in 10 countries the ratio of computers is more than 100 computers per 1000 people (Kurian 1997, 309); and (3) the WWW is accessible in more than 100 countries (Famighetti, 643). Additionally technology is being integrated into education, allowing students and teachers to become regular consumers of online information. The growth in this area is reflected in these statistics for U.S. public schools. In 1984 the average public school had 1 computer for every 63.5 students; in 1997 that number had changed to 1 computer for every 6.3 students (US Dept. of Commerce 1998, 179).

Why is the transmission of information an important topic? Because information is the raw material that is wrought into knowledge through human cognition. We can conceptualize information and knowledge as two points on a continuum. Information is data that have been given meaning through the human action of assigning relationships. Knowledge is the ability to apply information to explain or predict situations.

Information has always played an essential role in society. Archeological evidence suggests that Sumerians used clay tablets to record financial transactions more than 5000 years ago (James & Thorpe, 477). Additionally, it is believed that Speusippus of Athens made the first known attempt to compile a compendium of the whole of human knowledge around 350 BCE. It is a tradition that continues to this day. Since that time, information has become a commodity to be processed, exchanged and internalized into knowledge by a social system which has continually increased its "information metabolism" (Boisot 1995).

Information is a dynamic commodity and poor systems of delivery result in information imbalances. These imbalances can lead to a lack of equilibrium which may have important consequences, such as those possessing information reaping huge benefits while those without the information do not. For example, during the telegraph's heyday, the search for lucrative information imbalances resulted in "information scams." One of the earliest recorded occurred in the 1830s and involved the Blanc brothers of France who bribed several telegraph operators to supply advance market information. The Blancs found the effort to perpetrate this scheme paid off because they could use the information to make substantial gains while negotiating financial deals with those who did not have the information (Standage, 1998, 106).

The human phenomenon of continuing to develop technology has created an environment in which people can more readily record, organize and access information. This increase in information availability has led to an information revolution that is changing the nature of our world and is impacting all aspects of the infrastructure of society. Among the changes are a shift to a weightless economy (Quah 1997; 1998), an emphasis on connectivity that has increased speed in all human interactions and transactions (Davis & Meyer 1998, 6), a developing "knowledge society" (Drucker 1989, 187) an international movement toward more permeable intellectual borders (Borgman 1990, 8), and a blurring of the boundaries between disciplines (Geertz 1983, 19).

Are information and the economy truly related? Let's take a moment to look at the core concept of a weightless economy. All four of its main elements are directly related to information or information technology (Quah 1998). The first element is information and communications technology including the Internet. The second element includes all items related to intellectual property. The third element encompasses electronic libraries and databases. The final element covers traditional libraries and databases, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. In essence, the weightless economy depends on information to provide the framework for all economic activity. Perhaps Drucker (1993) said it best when he noted that social and economic value now relies on knowledge as a primary force instead of land, labor and capital.

From this economic perspective, information supports important functions of society, which adds significance to the task of creating mechanisms for information organization, collection, preservation and dissemination. In today's society, the prevalent approach to handling information has two features. The first tendency is to group knowledge into subject domains that follow "natural" lines of demarcation that are drawn by noting distinct characteristics that intuitively create boundaries between domains. For example, the human-centered focus of anthropology seems to naturally seperate it from the physical science approach of geology. The second tendency is to breakdown the items within these domains into small units in order to isolate individual thoughts. This drive to facet knowledge is represented by the increasing range of specialties found throughout the domains. When items are separated in this way relationships between them is minimized, and contextual meaning is lost. This isolation blocks the act of cognitive connection that leads to serendipitous discovery within the wider environmental.

The framework for organizing information often reflects the structure of the organization creating the information. This leads to a situation in which knowledge can be enclosed within boundaries that seem, to the creators, to have natural meaning. However, these boundaries may actually inhibit knowledge creation and production by isolating the information in an environment unlikely to be accessed by information consumers outside the creator's community. University culture provides an excellent example. Historically, universities have generally promoted discipline-specific communities that encourage research within their own domain with little cross-disciplinary participation (Pierce 1990, 46). Organizing information by the discipline in which it was created has been quite common and is the basis for many time honored categorization systems including the Dewey decimal system. More recent technologically-oriented information science literature also speaks to this concept by describing the study of discipline-specific information storage and retrieval (Florian 1991; Losee 1997a) including the use of vocabularies and sublanguages unique to each domain (Bricker 1991; Losee 1996; Haas 1997).

Clearly, discipline-specific journal literature is an important foundation for research. Still, research "growth is spurred on by activity on research fronts in, and occasionally between disciplines" (Doreian 1988). Boisot (1995) further theorizes that new knowledge is created through two processes: (1) through reconfiguration of data within a field or (2) through the import of data to a field from an external source. These thoughts suggest meaningful benefits of cross-disciplinary investigation and emphasize the need to provide researchers with a means to find the work that is related to their own, but has been conducted outside their own disciplinary boundaries. Taken a step farther, it means that an organizational structure that relies on domain-specificity may be intellectually confining and limit the efficacy of scholars and other researchers. Instead there is a need to encourage wider dissemination of findings, and to better integrate the work about similar topics that has been generated within different disciplines (Pierce 1990).

The value of interdisciplinary work has been recognized for several decades and while collaboration has borne fruit, the mechanics of sharing information within these associations has at times been daunting both administratively and intellectually. In the late 1980s a report by the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information Group on Interdisciplinary Searching (ICSTI) noted the importance of the issue and discovered many problems facing interdisciplinary researchers (Weisgerber 1993).

More than a decade has passed since the ICSTI report but many of the problems cited in the report still exist. Vocabularies are still very discipline specific with little effort made to create correspondence between groups studying similar or even the same phenomena. Additionally, sublanguages exist even within disciplines. This means that researchers may find it difficult to search unfamiliar disciplines for relevant information because they do not know the sublanguage. Yet, intimate knowledge of a relevant sublanguage greatly enhances the researcher's ability to retrieve relevant documents (Hsieh-Yee 1993). Therefore, if topic experts are not conversant with a particular domain's sublanguage, they may not even realize they are missing relevant material on the desired topic, and the knowledge creation process is impeded.

Is this really a problem? Some important agencies with well-funded programs seem to think so. For example, in the last several years the National Science Foundation has earmarked millions of dollars in funding to go to projects addressing problems of cross-disciplinary research, as well as to projects that encourage interdisciplinary participation. These are called "cross cutting programs" and they encourage increasing the ability of scholars to research and work with individuals outside their own discipline.

Rapid advances in technology have presented some solutions, but the uncoordinated growth of information depositories and systems has also created an environment in which vast amounts of data and information are available in multiple formats, at diverse locations utilizing myriad database and data architectures. This means that although there are more resources than ever available for researchers to access, it is still extremely difficult to find the "right" information from the different disciplines that may have data relevant to their own research.

Other barriers also exist that have discouraged cross-disciplinary access. For example, the sociology of scholars rewards publication in respected referred journals within the specialty field, and looks for citations within its own scholarly community. This leaves little room for interdisciplinary experimentation. Additionally, the very nature of the academy, and competition between units within the organization, results in a closed community attitude in disciplines.

Is there a possible solution? Mediation provided by a library or information professional can alleviate some of these cross-disciplinary search problems; however the specificity of the research may still require a subject expert in that discipline to suggest search strategies. Additionally, unless a researcher has thorough knowledge of the other discipline's sublanguage, vital information may be overlooked because of something as simple as an inadequate search term. In fact, the researcher will probably have no idea that s/he has been denied access to pertinent information.

The interdisciplinary focus currently favored by some grant funding agencies is also helping to reduce some problems by rewarding cooperation between disciplines and encouraging researchers to consider partners from a larger community. However, researchers in these collaborative projects still must define processes with which they can communicate and share information. These practical solutions begin to address some aspects of the problem, but they do not provide a framework for organizing knowledge-creating systems and the knowledge they produce. In essence, it is like bringing a pail of water to the desert to stop a draught—it may help one plant but the landscape will remain the same.

Instead the problem of cross-disciplinary information sharing must be tackled from a broader perspective. Stated more directly, it may be time to revolutionize the way we look at information. Work has already begun in this area. The International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) was founded in 1989 to promote a conceptual framework that would encompass knowledge organization in all forms and for all purposes. Clearly it is a difficult task to organize the phenomenon of information, with its many physical, biological, and behavioral properties and to integrate the complex nature of information with the human processes of communication that complete the equation of an information system (Saracevic 1970, 54).

Building an information system of this type requires the marriage of a theory of information communication with the tools provided by technology. I propose that a new knowledge structure design requires three features. First, the structure should be encompassing; exhibiting the ability to reflect the diverse range and perspectives of knowledge brought to a topic by many different disciplines. Second, the structure should be extensible; demonstrating the ability to adjust easily to reflect changes in the nature of knowledge, such as the evolution of new areas of study. For example, in the 20 years, AIDS was identified and the research regarding the disease has grown to become a unique field with a substantial amount of literature. An extensible organization structure has the capability to allow for disciplines and specialties to emerge, merge or dissolve with relative ease, creating a venue for participatory design. The third feature is the most important. The structure would leave the traditional path of defining information storage and retrieval from the perspective of where it originated. Instead, it would focus on classifying knowledge by defining the phenomenon addressed and creating multi-dimensional interfaces to service the information-seeking needs of the end-users.

While the idea of finding ways to integrate knowledge between disciplines may seem daunting, it seems more attainable when viewed as a structure with several component parts. I believe that such a Structure for Encompassing, Extensible Knowledge (SEEK) is supported by three pillars-- the theoretical foundation, the technological boundaries, and the organizational framework. I elaborate on each pillar below.

Pillar One: Theoretical foundation of the SEEK model

ISKO's definition of knowledge organization is "an interdisciplinary cultural activity which adds informational value to collections which contain knowledge" (ISKO, 1999a). This statement defines the foundation of the SEEK model. The development of SEEK accounts for fuzzy boundaries between disciplines. This logic follows the example of mathematicians who came to realize that the Aristotelian axiom of the excluded middle was not immutable and could be augmented by "fuzzy logic" which defined a continuum of values (Robertson 1998, 41). In the humanities, this approach has been explored extensively in the work of Clifford Geertz, who proposes that distinctions between genres have become blurred. Geertz notes that "more and more we see ourselves surrounded by a vast, almost continuous field of variously intended and diversely constructed works we can order only practically, relationally and as our purposes prompt us" (1983, 20). His statement has immense implications if it is applied to all disciplines and the myriad genres that exist within them.

Just as the human mind can both recognize a piece of information and act on it in many ways (Pinker 1997, 139), the SEEK model looks at the nature of knowledge and the way information is processed. I suggest employing two approaches. First, the document would be assessed in a standard format, defining the information by the boundaries of the discipline from which it originated. Second, the document would be assessed from the SEEK perspective, defining it in terms of the phenomena being studied and considering it part of an evolving body of cross-disciplinary knowledge. Without dealing with intellectual issues of specific content in the document, one can see that the traditional and SEEK perspectives could achieve very different results. For example, if the traditional model were used to catorgorize vehicles, "discipline origin" would translate into organizing the vehicles by what company originated them. Thus, vehicles would be grouped by brand, such as Ford, John Deere or Toyota. However if the SEEK model were used, then the focus would be on the "phenomena studied" or in the case of these vehicles, how they were used. The vehicles might then be organized by their utility, such as individual transportation, construction or farm work. A person who chose to look at Fords would see a wide array of vehicles ranging from economy cars to trucks. However, the person who chose John Deere would see mostly tractors. From both of these areas, some vehicles might be used for farm work, but it allows only a very limited picture. However the SEEK perspective creates a far more comprehensive idea of what vehicles are employed to work on farms, since this grouping could include everything from the family sedan to the large field tractor.

Researchers have studied different processes to link cross-disciplinary definitions. One successful approach is based on the idea of using a machine-driven interactive program to classify items by linking successors to super classes. In a sense, this means that a navel orange is put in the orange class and the orange is placed in the fruit superclass. This process allows new concepts to be added to a knowledge base and also allows attributes added to those concepts (Finin 1986).

However, this approach is very hierarchically oriented and does not allow the kind of conceptual linking that is part of the researcher's cognitive approach during cross-disciplinary exploration. The SEEK model greatly increases flexibility because its design emphasizes relationships between different perspectives of the phenomena. This means there is an increased ability to handle complex multidirectional connections rather than being constrained by more traditional hierarchical trees. The hierarchical tree is very much like a real tree. If a piece of information is a leaf, that leaf is attached to only one twig, and that twig to only one branch, and that branch to only one trunk. While we might trace that path from trunk to leaf or leaf to trunk, the path always remains the same.

In contrast, the SEEK model supports the creation of multiple relationships. Essentially, the piece of information can be thought of as a juncture point on a fishnet. From that point, many different pieces of string extend in many directions to other information points. If someone were to travel to that point on the fishnet by following the different strings as pathways, there would be multiple paths that could be taken. These different paths represent the different types of knowledge that may be gathered by different disciplines studying the same phenomena. One string might represent communication, another psychology, yet another biology. With this fishnet in place, researchers can determine which paths, or hierarchies they chose to follow. By creating this "knowledge fishnet" of connections, soft hierarchies develop as required for specific needs, and recursive relationships evolve to demonstrate how knowledge between disciplines may be dependent on or parallel to one another. Additionally, the fishnet structure has the capability to enhance performance and speed of information seeking and it is easily extensible . The fishnet needs to be visualized in a three-dimensional plane, where it may be folded and bent to provide connections between many different points in its structure. The knowledge fishnet is the basis for the extensibility of SEEK.

Studying how people create information and their methods of information seeking are the keys to designing a knowledge fishnet that is representative of both published information and of the human cognitive process. Over the decades, thousands of user studies have been conducted and reported concentrating on varying degrees of behavioral, sociological, and psychological elements. However most of these studies have tended to focus on small, specific user communities and few generalizations have emerged (Saracevic 1970, 42). What is needed is review of these studies, particularly the raw research data, leading to a new study design that will focus attention on discovering if there are commonalities across user communities throughout the world, and using these to build the basic threads of the knowledge fishnet. The new study should also strive to identify how users differ allowing for dynamic, evolving profiles that can be used to build additional cross threads that will be another basis for disciplinary access and eventually will encourage cross-disciplinary activity.

Pillar Two: Technology and the SEEK model

The SEEK concept is viable because of many advances in technology that ease the process of information manipulation and improve communication with the client. The focus on digital libraries has collocated the types of technology that answer the needs of the SEEK model. Further, the growing interest in digital libraries has spurred research and development leading to more powerful and refined tools. For the purpose of this essay, I apply the SEEK model to organizing information that will be available online, including on the Web. In addition, I briefly focus on highlighting examples of the technology that have been introduced for that environment.

The SEEK model of information organization offers many challenges, including representation of the knowledge fishnet or complex relationships among items. It also requires that the information system have the ability to translate and integrate domain-specific syntaxes so that the various aspects of one phenomenon can be accessible to searchers outside that specific domain. In essence, the system must take a term in one discipline and link it to a term that may have a similar meaning in another discipline.

The use of metadata and markup metalanguages offers some solutions to these problems. Metadata are structured data about data that facilitate the extraction of information from sites all over the web (Miller 1998).

Why is metadata such a powerful tool? In a word—interoperability. Metadata can be used as an almost universal system to tag records, making it easier for information to be accessed across many machine-induced barriers. Additionally, metadata handle the wide variety of methodologies and interchange formats associated with descriptive cataloging. Metadata can record linkage, relationship and structural data. Moreoever, metadata can have very complex relationships with an object. For example, an object treated as metadata may have the capacity to serve as stand-alone data in another instance, and this recursive relationship can be repeated on multiple levels (Lagoze 1996). In technology talk, these data characteristics are described as parent/child relationships with inheritable properties.

Markup metalanguages are encoding schemes designed to facilitate the communication of a precise interpretation of a document that allows computers greater capability to read and interpret data. XML, eXtensible Markup Language, is one such metalanguage.

Client communication is the other important area the SEEK model addresses. The goal of SEEK—to provide a means for cross-disciplinary sharing of knowledge—tdictates that individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds will use the system, which in turn suggests that there will be a variety of cognitive styles. Research in the area of human-computer interaction has noted that representations of knowledge vary by user community, a finding with fundamental implications for cognitive modeling and interface design (Guohua 1996; Stary & Pesch 1998). Given this reality, it is clear that the SEEK model would face important design questions in providing service to the wide range of clients. The probable answer is to create several different interface designs for accessing the information integrated in the organizational structure.

In essence, picture the data as a vast ocean and the interfaces as different vehicles to navigate these waters: a schooner, a powerboat, a seaplane, a submarine, and a jet ski. As with the real items, each of these vehicles has key mechanical characteristics that make them run, but is programmable to be operated by individuals with different vocabularies. For example, a powerboat can be driven by someone who speaks English or French, once the operator understands the rudimentary basics of operation. This means that a high school student seeking information might choose the seaplane—in effect looking for a simple overview and the ability to dip into certain areas. A cancer researcher might choose the submarine—since she wishes to explore all levels of a specific area of the ocean, even the deepest gorges. In each case we are dealing with the same universe of data. However, by providing "telemetry" and other appropriate navigational instruments the user has gained the ability to explore the universe in a comfortable way. Additionally, a user may choose to switch vehicles and gain a different perspective at any time.

The potential impact of the SEEK model can be judged by the experience of the digital library movement. Digital libraries are one element of the weightless economy model, and thus a key component in the information revolution. Through digital libraries, information reaches users across national borders and time zones, and provide new levels of service, such as full text searching by word or phrase, mixed media documents and document delivery to the desktop (Lesk, 1997). The digital library experience also highlights the importance of creating an information process that will evolve to meet the needs of users outside a small cadre of disciplines. The recent Digital Libraries Initiative Phase 2, sponsored by the United States' National Science Foundation, included among its goals developing information that would be available worldwide and usable by myriad communities of users, including those outside the hard sciences (NSF, 1999).

Pillar Three: Human organization to establish the SEEK model

I have established that there is a way to conceptualize knowledge that will add value to every piece of information. Further, I have established that technology exists that can handle information in dynamic and effective ways. However, I have also noted that there are real barriers to information flow and exchange in terms of scholarly communication. What else can we do to minimize those barriers?

That is where the third pillar of SEEK comes into play—the emphasis on human organization to guide and facilitate information communication. The overall idea of this structure is to establish think tanks that coordinate a collaborative effort of scholars worldwide from many disciplines, particularly library and information science, computer science, communication, anthropology, sociology, and the physical and biological sciences.

The concept of an integrated think-tank community has been championed for many decades. Vannevar Bush (1945) saw the value in encouraging such a community. He noted that major breakthroughs in science during the World War II effort were achieved by organizing scientists and engineers in teams, rather than having them work in isolation. Bush felt that an important goal for the future was creating an organizational structure that used technology to organize and retrieve documents, and relied on human indexing to build relationships between documents and disciplines. His vision is considered a foundation for the digital library movement (Lesk 1997, 13), and while many of his ideas have been implemented, the integration of multi-disciplinary scholars in the knowledge organization process is only beginning to be addressed.

ISKO has taken this international interdisciplinary approach and among its 17 national chapters, it has more than 500 members representing professionals from information science, philosophy, linguistics, computer science and specialties such as medical informatics (ISKO, 1999b). While this association exists and tackles problems associated with interdisciplinarity, its mission has not been widely adopted thereby limiting its impact on the research community.

What would a SEEK think tank do? The focus of the work would be to create a fully developed SEEK framework, including recommendations on how to use the framework for information creation, collection, organization and access. Think tank activities would include:

1. Collaborative information object relationship building.The think tank environment is conducive to creating a clearinghouse of ideas, With an interdisciplinary team in place, information objects could begin to be defined not by where they originated, but by the problems they are seeking to address. Clearly there needs to be a heuristic element in the software so that as relationships are established, later members can be more readily assigned associative links. However, I believe it first has to start with a convergence of human minds.
2. Idea brokering. Looking at information from the perspective of problem-orientation is likely to lead to idea exchange. In essence, when scholars have the opportunity to identify that the phenomenon they are studying is "on the same page", it will facilitate the sharing ideas and concepts. The think tank will help disciplines identify areas of overlap that currently may be unnoticed because there is not a homogeneous alignment of technical jargon or sublanguages. In a sense, the think tank environment encourages a cognitive flow between idea creators, which would facilitate finding a way to extend the impact of an idea beyond its initial conceptualization.
3. Agenda setting. Economically speaking, think tanks would create a mechanism that would maximize a scholar's knowledge of the research problem s/he was tackling. The direct communication created by the think tank would reduce labor lost on repeating previously-completed work, and would increase the likelihood that new work would add valuable new knowledge to the community at large. While a thorough literature review is always conducted by responsible researchers, there are repeated examples of disciplines not looking outside their own domains, often impeding their efforts by spending time creating redundant knowledge rather than extending the knowledge frontier.

So how do we accomplish this collaborative environment? In a perfect world the answer is to establish open research centers for the study of issues surrounding the development of SEEK at sites throughout the world. Obviously, this is a huge undertaking and funding would be a determining issue. In the last several years, U.S. universities have suffered a decline in public money for research. This has caused many researchers to work in private industry where the results are proprietary and thus not shared with the research community at large (Neef 1999, 89). Obviously this scenario is counterproductive to creating the international, interdisciplinary effort needed for establishing a fundamental framework such as SEEK.

There is a reason for hope. International collaborative research efforts have succeeded. For example, Neef (1995) notes that the international effort known as the Human Genome Project , is the largest knowledge generation and management project undertaken for the purpose of sharing information. As of June 2000, the worldwide consortium of 16 centers and more than 1000 scientists had completed a "working draft" of the genetic sequence that represents a human being. The networked organizational structure has proven to be very productive as evidenced by the fact that goals are being reached ahead of schedule (NHGRI, 2000).

Additionally, there are other types of self-actuated consortia appearing that are tackling some issues associated with a structure like SEEK. One is the Open Archives Initiative (OAi) which is addressing the need for coordinated, collaborative work in the area of scholarly information management. The Open Archives Initiative strives to find a way to promote world-wide accessibility of documents by creating a forum to discuss and solve matters surrounding interoperability and intellectual access.

OAi participants are diverse in their underlying motivations, but entirely unified in their objective of paving the way for universal standards for identifying archived scientific and scholarly research literature in widely distributed databases. The OAi committee members include a wide range of scholars, although digital librarians and computer scientists are focusing on issues related to interoperability, scalability, metadata, and electronic archiving. Among them are the founders of the principal public research archives that exist so far, such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Physics Archive which features more than 100,000 papers that have been self-archived by the authors or document creators. LANL is the first and largest archive of its type and is mirrored in 15 countries. It has impressive user statistics: more than 50,000 users daily and still growing. Following LANL's example, other disciplines and institutions have begun to create public research archives. This was one goal of OAi — to create a protocol that helps coordinate this growth and makes all these resources more readily available to scholars.

However, in developing overarching structures like OAi, we need to understand the human and social dimensions as well as the technologies. This will allow us to shape architecture, policies and protocols, as well as create an intellectual process that extends the boundaries of knowledge beyond the barriers that now constrain it.

I believe the human organization structure has to be approached from three perspectives. The first is the meta-perspective. This is the overall framework for the SEEK organization and the point at which the relationships and system of information sharing between regional component units would be defined. The second perspective, the macro-perspective, focuses on the regional component units themselves and how they are administered. Third, the micro-perspective relates to the individuals within the component units. In building the SEEK organization, the structure for communication among think tank members must be established. However, it must also address the psychological aspect in terms of finding procedures that are comfortable for individuals with different approaches to the information environment. For example, humanities scholars approach research in an entirely different fashion than researchers in the hard sciences. Each group would be very uncomfortable with the other's technique, yet each group can generally conduct a satisfactory search. Understanding how each of these approaches may affect the SEEK members' interactions with each other, as well as their approach to information-seeking, is imperative to successfully structuring the SEEK organization and ultimately the ontological structure that the group's work would suggest.

Funding remains a central question. OAi is not receiving any funding for the initiative itself, although some member institutions are working on funded projects that are part of the OAi mission. What other funding sources are available? A highly successful engineering-oriented educationally-based center listed four key sources for their funding (Miller 1992): (1) seed funding from the state and/or institution; (2) gifts from foundations, individuals, and business interests; (3) grants and/or contracts from foundations and also from dealings with private industry which would benefit from the development of this structure; and (4) from creating a consortium that represented the interest of the group. The SEEK structure could also tap these types of sources, although individual members would need to mount their own campaigns to support their sector of research — much as is being done with OAi. However, the value of SEEK is in its ability to help us see how we can begin to handle information in ways that makes it more valuable to those seeking to use it.

Conclusion

The SEEK model is designed to illuminate issues related to cross-disciplinary scholarship and to suggest ways that the various barriers can be overcome. Implementing SEEK is a very ambitious project that is not intended to be the work of an individual scholar. Rather it is presented as a means to study whether cross-disciplinary knowledge integration is possible. I believe evidence suggests that it is.

SEEK does offer a way to study the viability of such an integration concept. If the conceptual SEEK model is used to frame the research designed to tackle the different problems associated with the different pillars, then results may be integrated into a cohesive whole. To organize these results, research directions would be associated with a specific Framework Module. The conceptual boundaries of these Framework Modules are outlined below.

Framework Module 1 would study existing interdisciplinary focus. The module would assess what has been working and what has not in terms of knowledge structures and human organizational patterns. Some programs immediately come to mind, including the Liquid Crystal Development at Kent State University, the Research in Computing for the Humanities at the University of Kentucky, and the National Digital Library of Thesis and Dissertations which is a virtual entity that seamlessly crosses institutions, disciplines and national borders.

Framework Module 2 would focus on the human component from both the cognitive and behavioral points of view. How do people think? How do they organize their thoughts during research and discovery? There are many contributors and a voluminous amount of material in this area. What needs to be done is to organize and refine this valuable work so that it can be better utilized to design access to knowledge databases. Additional work in this area would include, but not be limited to, original research to determine what sort of barriers potential communities of users perceive, and user surveys at existing digital libraries to determine strengths and weaknesses.

Framework Module 3 would focus on the technological aspects and those developments that offer tools and promise for enhancing the SEEK model.

Framework Module 4 would focus on the evolving SEEK model. A testbed would be established to evaluate the lessons learned from modules 1-3. Given the active, collaborative nature of the digital library community and its supporters, the testbed would most likely be established in that environment and would involve a virtual entity with an "online" think tank. This testbed would allow assessment of many human and technical issues, as well as provide a unique opportunity for observing knowledge based issues. An added benefit would be that this testbed would also be an excellent laboratory for other types of research including computer aided mediation, and organizational communication.

Plutarch wrote, "The mind is not a vessel to be filled, it is a fire to be kindled". By making information more readily accessible to users from heterogeneous communities, the fire of many minds can be kindled and knowledge can grow, while the vessel walls that create boundaries can be erased.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank several people who provided invaluable support on this preliminary work: Dr. Timothy Sineath for introducing me to this concept; Dr. Donald Case for sharing his knowledge and research of "information"; and Dr. Gerry Benoit for critically reviewing a draft.

Works Cited

Back to Top
Home | Current Issue | Archives | Editorial Information | Search | Interact