B	Some Pervasive Characteristics of a Distinguished AKU
	1	A University on the "Information Superhighways" of the World.
		The spectacular progress of modern communications and information handling have opened prospects of both exciting opportunities and corrosive frustrations. They make it possible for students and scholars in remote places to seek out information and instruction from distant spots that they could not hope to visit. They make researchers able to keep abreast of rapidly developing fields even when they are far from the leading centres in their fields. But they bring challenges too; those who do not or cannot grasp these new powers risk falling farther than ever behind those who can use them. As the director of the Aspen Institute's Communications and Society Programme reinarked not long ago, "These technologies could bridge the gap between the rich and the poor, and they could also, I'm afraid, widen that gap". [Quoted in Gary Stix, "Domesticating Cyberspace", Scientific American, August, 1993, p.110]
		The developing countries have been particularly afflicted by their distance and isolation from centres of learning. The publications and travel that could keep them abreast of the frontiers of research and scholarship have been costly and too often skimpily provided. The advent of powerful electronic transmission of information is thus particularly promising for universities in these countries. There is, for many purposes, no electronic marvel that can substitute for direct human contact (even the face-to-face contacts of video-conferencing lack the serendipitous effects of being together), and we think it important that AKU maintain travel budgets that will enable its staff to mount the airplanes for distant campuses and laboratories when they need to. But the surrogates for travel multiply as cyberspace expands and there are few needs before AKU more urgent than being able to exploit them.
		The rapidity of the revolutions in information and communication is vividly apparent when one remembers that when AKU was starting just a decade ago, computing technologies were only beginning their migration from mainframe data centres to office desktops. Universities that had little beyond computation centres have had their campuses "wired" within and intricately linked to the world outside. In 1983, the Harvard Committee had journalism and information on its agenda, but it gave no special attention to the electronic potential that would loom shortly thereafter. By 1993 when there were 1.7 million computers in more than 125 countries on the Internet alone, it was impossible for the Chancellor's Commission to ignore the potentials that had come before AKU. And a summer 1994 survey showing that number to have grown in a year to 3.2 million computers has spurred our attention further.
		The educational and research potentials of these new powers can be illustrated by some recent testimonials on the uses of Internet : a blind student tells of tracking down archives of William Shakespeare's works that could be read on his speech synthesiser; an elementary school teacher in Las Vegas used electronic mail from an Australian graduate student working in Antarctica to show his third-grade class what it was like to live and work there; a New Jersey teacher had his word-processing class send "get well" messages via Internet to 40 Russian students from the Chernobyl area who were visiting a health spa in England; a concerned parent of a daughter with a spinal problem searched multiple data bases and bibliographies to find physicians who knew how to diagnose and treat the problem. [These examples from the Gary Stix article cited above.]
		In late 1992 a member of this Commission, Vartan Gregorian, gave the keynote address at a conference on "Technology, Scholarship, and the Humanities : The Implications of Electronic Information", sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Research Libraries Group, and others. [Summary of Proceedings. distributed by ACLS, 1993.] As a university president and former director of the New York Public Library, Gregorian spoke of a revolution, with total collected amounts of information doubling every four years, and universities subject not only to the "daunting arrival" of books and journals but now to an "electronic torrent from thousands of data bases around the world-". The problems that afflict universities and research libraries everywhere must be faced by new universities like AKU in the spirit that is now forced upon older universities. Individual universities need to make themselves part of wider enterprises, national and international in scope. As a vice-president of Carnegie Mellon University remarked at the same conference :
		"The university library is declining in importance relative to other information services. Any college, department or individual can mount its own information on computers, thus becoming part of a national electronic library service - in effect, an open library."
		Translating this vision to the circumstances of AKU, we can foresee a complex network of information resources in which the branches of AKU in different countries are interconnected among themselves, while departments, research units, and individual teachers and scholars are linked outside AKU to whatever they particularly need, wherever it may be in the world.
		The planning and development of such a "wiring" of AKU internally and externally will certainly be a formidable undertaking, requiring ample resources and years of effort. The available technology will be changing and cheapening at dizzying speeds, though some of it will bring disappointingly slow results (our Carnegie Mellon man finds that "electronic libraries are far more modest than the bold projections of the 1980s would have led many to expect. They are typically small, expensive and difficult to use."). Sound initiatives will require much study of experience elsewhere, consultation with experts, and in the end prudent judgements. The Commission believes that, when and if its proposals on the long term development of AKU are accepted, a task force should be set up to consider what the implications in information and communication needs may be. We recognise of course that the University already has a committee for planning for information resources, but we think that an expanded effort in wider and longer-term perspectives follows logically from the exercise of this Commission. And we further believe that, just as universities now have librarians and directors of computer and information services, AKU in future will need a high level officer overseeing the complexities of its communications and information resources.

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