Opening Session
Opening the meeting on Monday we are fortunate to be able to hear from Professor Janet Murray of MIT, who had originally been scheduled to address the CNI Spring 1998 meeting. Janet, who is the author of the recent delightful and important book from MIT Press titled Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (which I highly recommend), will speak about the future of narrative forms in digital media. Her work offers important insights on new genres for digital documents and the construction of instructional technology content, as well as a fresh understanding of how we read and learn in the digital culture. Janet has a long and distinguished career which includes an extensive involvement in digital media, including work with the MIT Athena project. Janet has also agreed to do a breakout session following her keynote in order to permit attendees to have a more in-depth discussion with her. You can find more information about Janet’s work at web.mit.edu/jhmurray/www/.
Closing Session
Our closing keynote on Tuesday will be by Brewster Kahle. In the early 1990s Brewster led the development of WAIS (the Wide Area Information Server system), which broke important ground in resource discovery, electronic publishing and distributed search on the Internet. WAIS Inc. was later acquired by America Online. More recently, Brewster has been working on issues involved in organizing and archiving the Internet as President of Alexa Internet (see www.alexa.com) and as the founder and Chairman of the Internet Archive (see www.archive.org). The Internet Archive recently donated two terabytes of web content in the form of an interactive sculpture titled “World Wide Web 1997: Two Terabytes in 63 Inches” to the Library of Congress. Brewster has been a pioneer in networked information for a decade, and will offer his views on directions for digital libraries and for network navigation.