Universities are the educational equivalent of urban centers. At a time when information was a precious commodity there was a clear advantage to concentrating scholars into centers of learning and research. Libraries existed to serve as the core information storage for scholars in diverse disciplines. The economies of scale lead to large institutions based around ever-growing libraries. Indeed, a common measure of institutional excellence has been the number of volumes held by its library.

In many ways, the combination of inexpensive personal computers and the Internet is directly comparable to the emergence of the automobile and the interstate highway system. Through the Internet, it is no longer essential for scholars to cluster at a major university in order to gain access to the latest information resources. In the future, libraries may be measured more by their ability to access and manage information resources than the number of volumes held locally. Will small rural colleges become the suburbs of the electronic information age?

A personal example:

A scholar of Constitutional law, Tom Schmeling would often drive to New York City to gain access to the latest Supreme Court rulings. While Skidmore College is an official Federal document repository, the logistics of GSA publication and distribution assured that the College's collection of Court documents was several months behind the major universities that had the means to copy the documents more rapidly.

Once the Supreme Court moved to Internet publishing around 1990, Tom had online access to all Court documents within 24 hours of their public release without leaving his campus office. Internet publishing erased a major disadvantage between working as a scholar in Saratoga Springs instead of New York City.

Can it work?

This model presumes that the principal scholarship limitations in small colleges are access to information and the ability to interact with other professional colleagues. It is equally possible that other factors, such as access to graduate students and an institutional culture that values research above all other enterprises, are dominant controls to faculty scholarship.

It should be possible to test empirically whether the Internet facilitates faculty scholarship by measuring authorship trends within the primary journals for a discipline:

• Have the number of publications from small colleges increased since universal access to the Internet?
(Easy access to information results in greater quantities of publishable scholarship.)

• Are scholars from small colleges more frequently appearing as co-authors in publications by scholars from the major research universites?
(Does easier communication lead to increased collaboration?)