SCIENCE AND SCHOLARSHIP ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB: A NORTH AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE

Published date01 February 1996
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/eb026965
Date01 February 1996
Pages163-171
AuthorBLAISE CRONIN,GEOFFREY MCKIM
Subject MatterInformation & knowledge management,Library & information science
SCIENCE AND SCHOLARSHIP ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB: A
NORTH AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE
BLAISE CRONIN and GEOFFREY MCKIM
School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University
Bloomington, IN
47405–1801,
USA
The potential significance of the World Wide Web for science and
scholarship is analysed from informational, communication, and
behavioural perspectives. Key factors to be taken into account are
(i) scale, (ii) cost, (iii) conviviality, (iv) community, and (v) legitimacy.
It is argued that the Web will have a transformative effect on the
way scientists and scholars access information and present the results
of their research to globally distributed peer communities
INTRODUCTION
IN A RECENT PAPER [1] we explored the potential of the World Wide Web
(www) to function as a global medium for virtual commerce. This is the second
part of the diptych, in which we consider the ways in which the Web can support,
and may alter, the conduct of scholarship. Background data on the scale and
growth of the Web as a cross-cultural phenomenon are provided in the first
paper, and not replicated here. The starting premise is simple: if the Web is set
to become the repository of most of the world's commercial and scientific
knowledge, then the ways in which scholars conduct their affairs will inevitably
undergo change. Although the Web is relatively tiny today, containing only a
fraction of
1%
of the world's publicly available data, it is tripling in size annually
and in six or so years should grow a thousandfold [2]. Future generations of
scholars will not be able to ignore the World Wide Web as a global exchange
forum.
WEB FEATURES
It would be myopic, however, to see the Web merely as a distributed document
store and/or digital reference library, though it increasingly satisfies both of these
functions. The Web is much more than a virtual analogue of existing archival
and library institutions. It is a dynamic, interactive and evolving environment
that supports new kinds of foraging and communication, in which scholars are
anything but passive participants
[3,
p.
8]:
'They go out hunting down new ideas
and building new connections ... A serious journey on the Net can articulate a
complex pathway, joining both nodes and links into intricate and informative
narrative structures. It's not a passive process.' Moreover, the Web is as much
a showcase for authors as a source of documents. In its recently developed
Journal
of
Documentation,
vol. 52, no. 2, June 1996, pp. 163–171
163

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