Gopher

Technology is Like a Fish

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[Professorial Lecture series post five]

“Technology is like a fish. The longer it stays on the shelf, the less desirable it becomes” – Andrew Heller; lead IBM RS6000 team

My Gadget Drawer

The odds are pretty good that every one of you has an old cell phone in a drawer at home, or perhaps even a gadget drawer that looks like the image on the right.  Our house has four. You may may keep old devices just in case something happened to your new one, or maybe you just didn’t know what to do with it. As technologically evolves at an ever-increasing pace the practice of discarding technological devices for shinier models with new and different features has become a part of our lives. As you will see, this applies to scholarly communications as well.

The technology life-cycle begins with invention of a specific technology, continues though a process of continuous improvement, and ends with how the technology is eventually diffused to the end user. The phrase bleeding edge is often used to describe the early adoption of a technology while the laggards are the last to adopt. The Tipping Point is the moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses threshold, tips, and becomes popular and commonplace. Consider just 10 years ago:

Each year, the Gartner group releases it’s technology Hype Cycle.  It is a continuum of where various technologies are in the hype cycle. Like with Gopher, many technologies will become obsolete before they even reach the tipping point. Keeping an eye on what is coming up on the horizon is sometimes more important than knowing the ins and outs of each technology. Many times it is not a single technology but a combination of technologies that when used together become a viable solution.

As Clayton Christensen discussed in his dissertation turned best seller The Innovator’s Dilemma, technologies are either sustaining or disruptive. Sustaining technologies improve a current product performance thorough increased efficiency. Disruptive technologies are often those where the ultimate use or impact is unknown at the time of release. Gopher was a sustaining technology since it really improved upon FTP. While in many ways Mosaic was a sustaining technology it was also disruptive since at the time of release we didn’t fully understand its potential for scholarly communications. In libraries, the online catalog was both sustaining and disruptive. It sustained the classic card catalog structure but disrupted how users could access resources.

The dilemma that the rapidly changing technology landscape at that time presented was trying to identify which emerging technologies could be used to sustain current models of scholarly communication and which technologies would creating disrupting models. Not only how would the technologies be identified, but how could the be used to keep scholarship in the discipline of librarianship relevant in a rapidly changing technology and communications environment.

[Next: Scholarly Communication and the Early Web]

A Gopher on the Reference Desk

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[Professorial Lecture series post four]

When I began my Ohio State career in 1992, the criteria for promotion and tenure at University Libraries was clear and straight forward. There was no dilemma.

“Candidates are expected to produce research/creative work of high quality and scholarly significance. The work is be be widely disseminated through publication and/or presentation.”

To meet this criteria I got to work on identifying my first research topic for my first publication.

At the time, FTP was the tool which was used to distribute documents on the Internet. The leading emerging Internet technology was system developed by the University of Minnesota called Gopher.

Gopher (SUNY Cortland)

Gopher was designed by a team led by Mark P. McCahill as a method for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents on the rapidly growing number of servers on the Internet. It’s text-based hierarchy menu interface was well-suited to the text-oriented computer systems which were common at the time. It joined existing services such as including WAIS, FTP and Usenet. There are still Gopher servers online today (video: The Hidden Internet: Gopher Protocol).

Having explored Gopher I found it a great tool to help facilitate library user access to the resources that began to populate Gopher. So, after exploring and using the system I got to work drafting my first manuscript, entitled A Gopher on the Reference Desk. I submitted for publication in the summer of 1993 and when it was accepted without revision my scholarly career was launched.

However, between the time that I submitted the paper and when in was actually published in 1994, Mosaic happened. While the World Wide Web had been in development for several years, it didn’t become accessible to Windows and Macintosh computers until Mosaic was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in September 1993.

The dilemma I immediately faced was that for all intents and purposes the already rapidly changing Internet landscape, coupled with the lag time of traditional print publications, turned my paper into a historical piece even before it was published. While many will say that remains a useful scholarly communication since it documents the technology of the day. However, my professional goal was to influence the deployment of new technologies in other libraries.

[Next: Technology is like a Fish]