This paper was presented at the 1997 CAUSE annual conference and is part of the conference proceedings, "The Information Profession and the Information Professional," published online by CAUSE. The paper content is the intellectual property of the author. Permission to print out copies of this paper is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage and the source is acknowledged. To copy or disseminate otherwise, or to republish in any form, print or electronic, requires written permission from the author and CAUSE. For further information, contact CAUSE at 303-449-4430 or send e-mail to [email protected].

Joanne Eustis, Information Systems

Gail McMillan, Scholarly Communications Project, University Libraries

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

The American system of higher education has been challenged in recent years as confidence in educational institutions has eroded. The public perception appears to be that the values and preferences of research universities, in particular, have become disconnected form the ethics and needs of society at large. This has produced demands from governing boards and funding agencies for more accountability and productivity. Furthermore, universities are perceived as failing to prepare students to live and work in a global world, as engaging in studies that are out of harmony with contemporary society, and as neglecting to empower students though involving them in a dynamic relevant learning process.

In response to this environment Virginia Tech developed an ambitious technology program called the Instructional Development Initiative (IDI) that proposes "to transform the academic lives of all students and faculty and change the nature of teaching and learning . . . ." Substantial resources were committed to provide faculty members with the necessary equipment and skills. With the focus on faculty and electronically enhanced courseware less thought has been given and few resources are devoted to devising a coherent, strategic plan and online presence for electronic services (marketing, library, bookstore, faculty instructional technology support).

We will describe two technology initiatives---Virginia Tech Online (VTO) and the Scholarly Communications Project (SCP) that are the result of self-organizing, collaborative work by information systems/library personnel, and academic faculty members. These seek to supply electronic support services currently lacking and to take advantage of the network's capacity to reach the global community. VTOnline serves as a single point of contact for all computer-mediated instruction, administrative, and information services that are available at Virginia Tech over the Internet. The SCP publishes electronic journals and international newspapers, experiments in scholarly electronic communications, and works with the university community to provide training, archiving, and electronic reserve service, in short access to library resources for extended campus learners.

The American system of higher education has been challenged in recent years as confidence in educational institutions has eroded. The public perception appears to be that the values and preferences of research universities, in particular, have become disconnected from the ethics and the needs of society at large. This perceived disconnection has manifested itself in a media focus on, among other things, the quality and relevance of undergraduate education. In turn, the media attention has produced demands from governing boards and funding agencies for more accountability and productivity. Furthermore, universities are perceived as failing to prepare students to live and work in a global world, as engaging in studies which are out of harmony with contemporary society, and as failing to empower students through involving them in a dynamic, relevant learning process.

Some critics argue that there is an opportunity for universities to restructure themselves through the use of digital technology into vital organizations which will enhance student learning and meet the challenges of the 21st century. Institutions of higher education that seize this opportunity are destined to undergo more change in the next twenty five years than they have in the past 200. Indeed, it is possible to imagine a revolution in the way members of the university community teach and learn, and the way they access, transfer, and communicate information that will profoundly alter the world of higher education. More importantly, through the use of technology higher education will be able to accommodate the educational requirements of an increasingly diverse and expanding global student population.

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) is a land-grant and research university located in southwest Virginia with a student population of approximately 24,000. The university employs 1640 full-time, tenure track faculty and 4,000 staff members. Media Services, formerly called the Learning Resources Center, has existed since the early seventies, and a Center for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching was established in the early nineties to foster instructional excellence and innovation. Recently, the Center for Innovation in Learning (CIL) was established and endowed with substantial funds to support the development of online courses and provide an infrastructure, technical support, and assessment of results in targeted curricular areas. CIL also serves as an umbrella for coordinating communications and developing partnerships focused on integrating technology in learning.

Despite these resources and innumerable directives from Virginia's higher education oversight agency, the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia, to use technology to increase productivity of administrative and teaching processes and to emphasize extended campus initiatives, there was, until the mid-nineties, little evidence of interest among faculty members in non-traditional teaching methodologies. In 1993, the Vice President for Information Systems and the University Provost jointly proposed an Instructional Development Initiative (IDI) and subsequently centrally funded it to redress this situation. From the outset, the goals of the IDI [slides 3-5] for the 1994-98 time period, had three components:

IDI Goal 1: Faculty Development [slide 3]

The IDI should provide the opportunity for all faculty in the University to participate in this faculty development program. Its overarching goal is to motivate teaching faculty members to investigate, create, and utilize alternative instructional strategies.

Participants who complete the IDI program receive state-of-the-art instructional technology, gained the knowledge to use it and the motivation to collaborate with their colleagues in leveraging instructional technology in their courses.

IDI Goal 2: Student Access [slide 4]

All students will be advised about their investments in computer technology to maximize its usefulness during their college career. All students who do not have their own personal computers will have better access to computing resources and to computer labs for accessing specialized software such as Perseus, Mathematica, and Daedalus which is unique to disciplinary areas.

Students will receive network-based training materials to ensure that they have a basic foundation in the use of computing and instructional technology resources.

IDI Goal 3: Course Development [slide 5]

Faculty will receive support to develop network accessible courseware and instruction.

IDI will facilitate the development of electronic libraries of scholarly materials supporting designated courses and improved classroom and presentation facilities will support faculty efforts to introduce new technologies into core curriculum courses. [1]

Within the Instructional Development Initiative, the Faculty Development Institute has received the most support and is a continuing program. All faculty members can attend intensive training sessions at the end of which they receive new workstations. They also have the opportunity cycle through the summer institutes every four years.

With the focus on faculty and their electronically enhanced courseware, less emphasis has been given to another difficult challenge--devising a coherent, strategic plan and an online presence for electronic support services (e.g., marketing, library, bookstore, and student services for online courses). We will describe two technology initiatives that support all of the IDI goals developed outside the usual organizational mechanisms.

THE VIRGINIA TECH EXPERIENCE: VTO AND SCP [slide 6]

Virginia Tech Online (VTO) and the Scholarly Communications Project (SCP) are two technology initiatives that are the result of self-organizing, collaborative work by information systems and library personnel with administrative and academic faculty members. Each initiative seeks to supply electronic support services previously lacking and to take advantage of the network's capacity to reach the global community. The first, VTOnline serves as a single point of contact for all computer-mediated instructional, administrative, and information services that are available at Virginia Tech over the Internet. The second, the Scholarly Communications Project publishes electronic journals and international newspapers, experiments in scholarly electronic communications, and works with the university community to provide information, archiving, and electronic reserve services--in short, access to digital library resources for local as well as extended campus learners.

Scholarly Communications Project [slide 7]

The Scholarly Communications Project developed from a 1988 request by a Virginia Tech faculty member to begin a new scholarly journal and another request by an administrator to establish a university press. It was envisioned that the university could use a rapidly maturing technology base to accomplish both a place where new scholarly works could be published but without the capital outlay that would be required to begin a print-based publishing operation. Since the would-be faculty editors were not necessarily the ones well versed in the technology, there existed an obvious need for support services. In addition, there was the need to define what were electronic journals, and, perhaps more importantly, what were, or what will scholarly communications be in the future. Therefore, with being an online publisher, the SCP would be a place to experiment with the technology to produce online scholarship in new and developing formats.

Administrators in Information Systems and the University Libraries almost immediately moved the Scholarly Communications Project out of Communications Network Systems into the main library. The library would provide user-friendly services initially to faculty-editors and later to new online readers as well as strong technical support from its Library Automation Department. From the beginning the staff associated with the Scholarly Communications Project and the faculty and staff at the university who requested their support have independently determined what experiments to conduct--how to solve the questions posed by the community, how to address the issues raised by the technology, and how best to meet the needs of the users and clientele.

Since 1989 SCP has participated in a variety of partnerships with units and individuals within the university community to produce unique online resources that are well suited to networks and the beginnings of the digital library. Through partnerships with over a dozen faculty members on and off campus, SCP publishes and archives electronic journals. It designed both an electronic reserve system that hosts online class materials prepared by the faculty and a unique and growing digital image database. It has collaborated with regional and international agencies to provide online access to international newspapers and local news reports. In a partnership begun four years ago with the Graduate School, SCP developed and implemented procedures for online student submission of theses and dissertations (also masters reports and bachelors theses), resulting in permanent archiving and timely public online access to approved graduate research. These are some of the ways libraries, both independently and through collaboration, improve their services and increase the wealth and quality of information, creatively using existing staff and evolving technologies.

Electronic Journals [slide 8 SCP ejs]

From that first request in 1988 grew the electronic-only Journal of the International Academy of Hospitality Research, followed quickly by a second request for support from a faculty editor of a traditional scholarly journal. Word spread informally that the Scholarly Communications Project would work with faculty to put their ideas about an electronic journal into practical applications. Three more were added within the first year: Community Services Catalyst, the Journal of Technology Education, and the Journal of Fluids Engineering. The first two editors soon grew accustomed to sending SCP a set of files at the same time they sent a set to the print shop. The editor of the JTE had also maintained a back file of diskettes for all previous issues, and the SCP was able to mount the entire run as plain (ASCII) text on its Gopher server. When the SCP migrated to its first WorldWideWeb browser in February 1993, staff began adding the HTML tags and linking the citations in the articles to their references and, whenever possible, linking the citations between articles within the journal.

At the same time, our Virginia Tech faculty editors began to request that the SCP more broadly interpret "ejournals." Since electronic journals were a relatively new concept we left it up to the editors to define their electronic works. One result is the online version of the Journal of Fluids Engineering, an aggregate of raw data (called a databank) upon which research described in the print journal articles are based.

About two-thirds of our ejournals are edited by faculty from our university and a similar number are available in dual formats--online and paper. Many of the faculty editors want to do more than develop a Web-presence for their journals. They also see themselves in educational roles with their subscribers, giving them a reason to use the Internet and the Web. They have goals similar to the library’s in that they want to provide, not only access to information, but also the knowledge to conduct further research independently.

At the same time, these faculty saw how easy SCP makes it for them to publish electronically. Not wanting to curb anyone’s creative instincts nor limit the potential of their electronic journal, SCP has very loose guidelines for editors. We accept everything from ASCII and standard word processed files to already-tagged HTML and PDF (Portable Document Format from Adobe) files. We receive mostly word processed files and assume responsibility for HTML tagging for Web presentation, inserting linking URLs, and converting for-print graphics to digital images. Ironically, this was done to facilitate faculty participation but at the same time we refrained from recruiting additional faculty/editors or publications. (More on staffing in a minute/below.)

While many electronic journals are not very 'experimental' anymore, there is a noticeable increase in the level of technological expertise among our newest faculty editors. They no longer want to know which word processor we'd like them to use, they want to know if we'd like HTML and/or PDF files. Would we like the graphics imbedded in text of the articles or would we like them in separate files? If so, would we be responsible for making sure the links are in place and working? Would we accept an issue of the journal as one PDF file as well as each article in a separate file? This demonstrates that they have not only a much better understanding of the capabilities of the technology but also that they have had hands-on experience with the various popular file formats but continue to view the library in its role as supporting learning.

As a librarian in addition to being an electronic publisher, I try not to answer questions but to get the editors to think about their readers, current and potential, and what might be the best format, the best file size, the best online display for them. The Project works not only with Virginia Tech faculty and those from other campuses, but also with community and commercial-based enterprises. They tend to have the same motives as the faculty editors, that is to learn about the possibilities of the technology through practical applications, to educate their clientele, and to experiment. The SCP’s philosophy is not to turn anyone away because we believe that we have a tri-part mission: to provide access to information through networked access, to experiment with new technologies, and to provide excellent library services.

Staffing at the Scholarly Communications Project [slide 9]

The Scholarly Communications Project's personnel has always been limited. Initially there were two half-time positions, the director (shared with Technical Services) and a programmer/systems analyst shared with the Library Automation Department. Interdepartmental sharing of staff or resources was not standard operating procedure, but both staff members were accommodated in their new and evolving roles. In 1994/95 a third, half-time position was added which focused almost entirely on HTML tagging. This position, like the director’s, also came from technical services. In 1993 my position as director was officially removed from technical services (where I had worked for 14 years) and devoted full-time to the Scholarly Communications Project.

Subsequently, the half-time technical assistant’s position was upgraded from half- to full-time, in part because, first, online records completely replaced manual records and eliminated maintenance of dual formats, i.e., paper and online. Secondly, library technical processing was de-emphasized partially due to an administrative goal to put more people on the front lines, that is at the reference desks and information service points, for increased personal interaction with library patrons.

The gradual weaning of these two positions from traditional technical services is evidence of the changes technology has instigated in the organization. Further evidence is the 1996/97 upgrading of the then-vacant technical assistant position to that of a programmer so that manual tasks could be accomplished programmatically through in-house scripting. Because the Project’s activities have grown steadily, while the staffing has not kept pace with the number of new resources SCP hosts, the experiments it runs, or with the additional teaching functions, the SCP has on only two occasions actually solicited new electronic resources to publish--Virginia news reports. We know many more faculty participate in scholarly journal editorial boards, but we are afraid of success. Therefore, we continue as we have done for seven years and collaborate largely with faculty members that seek the support services of the Scholarly Communications Project.

While I have focused on electronic journals to this point and given you only an indication of these activities, I have not reacted much differently when contacted by newspaper publishers or campus administrators looking to push the envelope in a pragmatic, not theoretical, way. Three examples to briefly report are ETDs, Electronic Theses and Dissertations, regional news reports and international newspapers, and the online reserve desk system.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations [slide 10 ETD homepage]

The Dean of the Graduate School contacted the library’s theses liaison (the head of the cataloging department) about four years ago to say that "these things" called electronic theses and dissertations were coming and didn't the library want to begin to prepare for them. As the SCP director and fellow cataloger, the theses liaison contacted me and I said, "Of course." Initially I brought together the library personnel who were involved in processing the paper versions. Among us, we drafted the procedures and access mechanisms which eventually led to a working prototype in 1993. Today there is a constantly growing secure archive of over 500 ETDs from Virginia Tech available on the Internet.

For hundreds of years libraries have stored and occasionally circulated these final products of graduate students’ education. Libraries are taking the initiative to address concerns such as online archiving, unrestricted vs. limited access, and intellectual property. Though discussion began at Virginia Tech more than a decade ago, about twenty universities in the United States, Europe, and Australia are now establishing a Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. Their goals are many, including: [slide 11]

* Collect, catalog, archive, and provide scholars with access to ETDs beyond the host academic community as a way for universities to learn about digital libraries.

* Increase technology and knowledge sharing so that graduate research results are more readily and completely available.

* Improve graduate education through more effective information sharing, including literature reviews and bibliographies.

* Teach graduate students about electronic publishing and digital libraries so that they can apply that knowledge through researching, building, and submitting their ETDs.

* Save students money producing their final research projects.

* Timely public access to current research--available all day, everyday; never checked out and never overdue.

* Reduce the need for additional shelf space in university libraries and archives.

* Eliminate the need to bind, stamp, security strip, and label, as well as to circulate and reshelve materials so that libraries can serve more users without increasing staff.

* Provide unlimited browsing, searching, and linking to related works and resources on the Internet/Web.

In addition to the long term benefits, preparing and sharing works in progress fits well with the increasingly popular tenets of asynchronous learning--the independence of time and place of the participants--the authors, the review committee, and the eventual readers. When electronic theses and dissertations are the accepted form of the terminal work, progress toward completion of graduate studies can continue even when a committee member leaves town on sabbatical, for example.

News Reports [slide 12 VA News homepage]

Wallowing in the success of our first few electronic journals and initial experiments with ETDs, and the successful migration from Gopher to Web without any additional investment in hardware, we agreed to download news reports from two regional newspapers. This was seen largely as an opportunity to improve existing library services. While library users were reading the newspapers in paper, accessing a manually prepared online index, and photocopying articles, we saw an opportunity to provide our university community as well as the then-new Blacksburg Electronic Village with timely access to local and regional news reports, programmatically indexed and searchable at all hours of the day and night beyond the walls of the library and the physical boundaries of campus.

From "Virginia News" we learned an important lesson that we took with us when we approached our local CBS-affiliate. To expand this popular library resource would be easy since the television news reports were already automated to support closed-captioning for hearing impaired viewers. We met with the station manager to whom we described our expertise in managing publications for the Web, effective security precautions resulting in stable and constantly-available information resources, as well as our experience with indexing and search engines. WDBJ7 agreed to send us their news reports and local programmers wrote scripts that linked the reports to a calendar. Usually within 24 hours of airing on the television, WDBJ7 news reports are available through the Scholarly Communications Projects.

Having accumulated the hardware through the growth of the ejournal collection, we felt confident that we were ready to handle anything we could get in an electronic format. Based on the staffing levels I have described, we could not scan from hard copy. Initially, however, we digitized a few minutes of the accompanying video clips so that while reading a story, the reader could also see and hear a televised interview, for example. This more fully replicated the content of the news reporting, while lacking faithful reproduction.

A very important consideration from our point of view at this time was the news organization’s willingness to download or send of news reports files to us electronically. This was a pragmatic issue since we felt we were now in a position to over extend our personnel, but certainly not our technology. We had enough experience with accessing external computers to know that their frequent inaccessibility (someone turned it off or changed the password or just didn't add the files) was very time consuming and left the impression with online library clients that we were not providing a good service or reliable resources. Giving the resource originator responsibility to send the information to us and our responsibility being to make it accessible and maintain an archive has worked very well.

That the Scholarly Communications Project was in a position to negotiate for library services and resources was, again, not standard operating procedure. An important factor was the simultaneous improvement to library and information resources available beyond the library while at the same time stretching the usual methods of access to library materials--all with existing library staff, free software from the Internet, mostly self-taught skills, and modest equipment purchases. The library organization was changing.

[slide 13 International News homepage]

Last March (1997) a news agency contacted SCP about an experiment to supply international newspapers online. NewsExpress was working with four libraries in the Washington area and thought that Blacksburg might be a little far away (a five hour drive from DC), but they'd heard about the Scholarly Communications Project and thought we might be interested. By now it is evident that our philosophy is to "never say no," but one minor problem is that SCP was without any technical staff. The original technical director had been lured away to the computing center and our full-time markup person (and unofficial programmer, a computer science undergraduate) had been hired away by the Library Automation Department. Therefore, I created a Web page and NewsExpress gave me a password so that I could download files as they became available and as I had time. With the arrival of a new programmer, SCP has since worked with the NewsExpress to programmatically download and link each issue to the homepage for its newspaper title. [Use the Internet to show International News and homepages of Le Monde, as an example.] Certainly not the usually library reaction to new information resources, but the result of having a unit within the library with the experience with the new technology and its network applications as well as the authority (opportunity?) to take action. The freedom to add to and the responsibility to maintain new materials in the libraries collection enables the initiation of experiments that would otherwise have taken months to work through the governance structure. Library services improved as has our use of the technology to meet the increased information resources for the university community both on and away from campus.

Electronic Reserves [slide 14]

During this period, staff in other areas of University Libraries were also beginning to explore new avenues of information access. Some Reserve Desk staff had attended a meeting about online course materials and the Scholarly Communications Project was exactly the place for such an initiative.

In the spring of 1995 about thirty faculty at the FDI (Faculty Development Institute) heard that the first Electronic Reserve system was available and that they could put their class materials online, just like they were used to doing through the library's Reserve Desk. The result of that announcement and training session was that eight faculty, teaching ten classes, sent their files of online class materials to the library. These files were linked to the Web through lists of class numbers and instructors’ names, just as has been traditionally done at the Reserve Desk. At the end of the first semester, students and faculty in each of these classes completed a written survey to determine their level of satisfaction with the EReserve system and to gather comments about how to improve it. Both the students and participating faculty were enthusiastic. The following summer and each break since then I introduce faculty to the central archive and directory of class materials online. From an online version of the Reserve Desk, EReserve has expanded to include (1) links to class materials available on servers outside the library and (2) a server where faculty can manage their full range of class materials without waiting for library intervention before they become available to their students.

Designing systems to host electronic reserve, journals, and theses/dissertations has enabled the library to expand its role to that of a digital library and to increase its instructional and publishing activities. It takes grassroots support from faculty (and students) and collaboration between disparate university components to make this variety of resources, access methods, and services available for the distance as well as the traditional, on-campus learners. Support through formal channels and university governance is important as is informal encouragement to learn new procedures and to develop new technologies that will exploit the potential creative expression that electronic resources will become. Especially important is the library’s ability to evolve into new roles as needed and as appropriate. An example is an evolutionary partnership with faculty, administrators, and information systems personnel that resulted in VTOnline

Virginia Tech Online [slide 16 VTO homepage]

Virginia Tech Online was created in response to a number of perceived needs. The process, by which VTO came into being is as interesting as the results and will be described later. It is currently a pilot project, incomplete and imperfect---a work in progress. The intent of VTOnline is to make possible improved and efficient marketing of Virginia Tech's online and electronically-enhanced courses by providing a web site that presents all of Virginia Tech's electronic, learning opportunities. In particular, goals included: [slide 17 VTO goals]

* Support student enrollment in electronic courses by providing links to electronic services such as online enrollment, financial aid, the Hokie Spa (transcript and registration services), University Bookstore online order forms, electronic reserve, and library services and resources.

* Encourage the development of additional online course materials by providing links to electronic services for faculty members regarding the design, delivery, support (i.e., electronic reserve) and assessment of innovative, computer-mediated teaching.

* Demonstrate that Virginia Tech wishes to recruit and retain international students by providing, for example, VTOnline in a number of languages. Initially, the languages, in addition to English, are French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian. As soon as possible Korean and Arabic language versions will be added.

Before VTOnline, Virginia Tech did not display in a coherent way the extraordinary and creative work that is the result of the Faculty Development Institutes. Certainly, most college and academic departments point to the online work of their faculty. For instance, an extremely innovative program in the College of Arts and Sciences---Cyberschool---maintains a web site for the work of Arts and Sciences faculty but it is hidden several layers down from the main Virginia Tech page.

Therefore, VTOnline serves foremost as a single point of contact for all computer-mediated instructional and information services across the university. VTOnline provides easy-to-use information about all of the instructional, administrative, and public service activity that is available at Virginia Tech over the Internet. It provides a point within the university that coordinates information concerning online degree programs, short courses, extension activities, and public service initiatives. It also links existing and new network centered teaching initiatives, ranging from course and program innovation to intellectual property policies, assessment, and evaluation practices. [Demonstration and explain of VTO]

Virginia Tech: Self-Organizing rather than Shared Governance

From a planning and policy perspective, almost as interesting as the operationalizing of VTO (which is modeled on similar web sites at the University of Illinois and the University of Colorado), is the process through which plans and implementation decisions were made locally. Coincidentally, in the spring 1997 issue of CAUSE/EFFECT, Richard Katz records an interview with Margaret Wheatley that also reflects our experience working with VTOnline:

What I have observed is that the minute you create access along these [self-organizing] networks, you are creating a revolution. Networking is an incredibly revolutionary act. It is probably the best way to bring down an existing structure. People find each other. They find who they need. They enjoy the creativity that's available once they can find others for what they need. They organize like crazy into different groups. It changes them. It changes their work. Ultimately they ignore the existing structures. [2]

Traditionally the one mechanism for collaboration, across disciplines and administrative units and among faculty, staff and students, that enriches the university experience for all concerned, has been the governance system. Built through an iterative process over many years, participation in governance brings together faculty, administrators, staff, and students to contribute to the progress and development of the university. Clearly, faculty and staff want a voice in planning the use of information technology. As indicated by the recent surveys conducted by a subcommittee of the university's self study task force, only 14.7% of the faculty and 12.3% of the staff believe they have an adequate voice in decisions regarding informational technology.

Nonetheless, in the new context for higher education the governance system is felt by many to be a hindrance rather than an asset. It may take as long as a year to "move" a policy through the system or to gain the necessary approvals for a new course or acceptance for major revisions to an existing academic program. In addition, the governance system does not operate in the summer since many students are not in residence and faculty members with nine month contracts are not available. This is not an acceptable time frame in a climate where the accelerating pace of change combined with legislative and governing board assertiveness requires expeditious decision-making. Faculty members seem to be well aware of the problem.

The problem is complex because the institution will thrive only on the basis of the energy, creativity, active participation, and the commitment of its faculty and staff who traditionally regard a shared governance system as their prerogative. At the same time, the university will fail to thrive if it cannot provide timely service for constituents, and react to the Board of Visitors’ or a state agency’s restructuring requests, or take decisive action when offered an opportunity to increase revenue.

In addition, information technology has created, almost overnight, new mechanisms for collaboration, communication, and building "virtual communities"--the self organizing process described by Margaret Wheatley. At Virginia Tech mechanisms such as the Faculty Development Institute, Center for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Center for Innovation in Learning, and the initiatives of the Scholarly Communications Project are intermixed and sometimes in conflict with older mechanisms and community structures, i.e., the departmental, administrative shared governance systems.

Because the nature of information technology requires timely and complicated decision-making, and because the university is becoming transformed as a result of new partnerships, more responsive procedures must be developed to take advantage of new opportunities, to handle the volume of curricular change, and, to make the necessary policy revisions. However, an improvement in responsiveness cannot be made at the expense of the quality of deliberation on such issues as the development of new programs and the degree to which they accomplish university goals.

In summary, the network is a metaphor for our work style. As we proceeded to implement VTO and the Scholarly Communications Project’s initiatives rather than work within organizational boundaries or proceed through the governance systems for approval, groups of faculty members, librarians, educational technology/media specialists, systems analysts, graphic designers, and admissions personnel work together on an ad hoc basis to accomplish the goals of this land-grant university.

1. Instructional Development Initiative : Phase II. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1997 p. 15.

2. Katz, Richard N. "Higher Education and the Forces of Self-Organization: An Interview with Margaret Wheatley." CAUSE/EFFECT. Spring 1997, vol. 20, no. 1:18.

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Katz, Richard N. "Higher Education and the Forces of Self-Organization: An Interview with Margaret Wheatley." CAUSE/EFFECT. Spring 1997, vol. 20, no. 1:18-21.

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