Electronic Information and Technology: Impact and Potential for Academic Libraries

or centuries the power of information has been understood, and great efforts have gone into controlling it. But with the spread of education and literacy in the Western world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the control of information and ideas has become more difficult. While experts disagree on the date, sometime during the last half-century computers and telecommunications began to converge to produce an information society which, according to Harlan Cleveland, is transforming not only our personal lives but also our national politics and our international relations. Computers have enorm<?usly increased humanity's power to think and analyze, and the telecommunications revolution allows the new knowledge being produced to spread at nearly the speed of light to anywhere in the world. As the amount of information has grown, more and more people have come to work with it-to produce, organize, distribute, use, study, control, and sell it-and whole new industries have grown up around it. In most areas decision making has become cqnsiderably more participatory because the volume of information available on almost any subject can no longer be digested and understood by the limited number of individuals who once made decisions. While more information is available to greater numbers of consumers, and the spread of microcomputers in homes, offices, and laboratories makes access more widespread, there are forces working to limit access to information in electronic formats. Governments have traditionally classified information critical to national defense, but recently, however, the Reagan administration attempted to control access to unclassified but "sensitive" government information in both government and private databases through executive branch directives. As a consequence of strong criticism aired during congressional hearings by witnesses both inside and outside of government-including librarians-one directive has been rescinded, and it appears that the other will be stopped through legislation. 1 At the same time, industries attempt to control information in order to secure their competitive positions