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The Internet: Changing the Way Horticulturists Communicate
Tim Rhodus and James Hoskins
INTRODUCTION
This article examines opportunities for enhanced information access and dissemination available to professional horticulturists using the Internet. The intent, however, is not to provide a comprehensive cataloging of where and how to find various databases or sources for multimedia educational resources. While some of these resources are reviewed, the goals of this article are to provide a background to the Internet environment and to examine the communication impacts of the Internet on horticultural researchers and educators. Our view is that computer-aided communication is an opportunity challenge, which should be confronted by individual horticulturists and the discipline as a whole. Examples of these new resources that can have a positive impact on the work accomplishments of work responsibilities of horticultural professionals are discussed.
TRADITIONAL MODEL OF SCHOLARLY RESEARCH
In basic terms, scholars engage in a process of generating and disseminating information. This traditional model of scholarly activity can be characterized by a professor who conducts original experimentation or inquiry, either alone or in collaboration with peers, and then publishes findings in a scientific journal. Having passed the process of peer-review, journal articles imply an endorsement of professional quality and serve to inform others of current developments in the field. Research results are also presented "live" at scientific meetings, an activity which provides wider audiences within the discipline an opportunity for interaction, evaluation, and feedback. Scrutiny of one's research by peers can initiate a process of reflection and refinement which leads to further investigation and generation of additional data. Ultimately, research occurs as a dynamic cycle of information dissemination and acquisition.
While the traditional model is focused primarily on information dissemination among peers, there are also implicit responsibilities to further disseminate information to the general public and commercial operators through teaching, Extension and Society programs, and popular media publications. The American Society of Horticultural Science's journal HortTechnology is an example of a publication where researchers place results before a specialized general public. Frequently, the responsibility of information dissemination to the general public is removed from the individual scholar and placed with professional editors and writers who work in Extension or on the staff of journal publications.
ENHANCEMENT OF THE TRADITIONAL MODEL
The central issue to address is whether the traditional model of scholarly research and its methods of information acquisition and dissemination needs to be examined for weaknesses in light of recent developments in telecommunications technology. Stated affirmatively, does computer-aided communication present opportunities for improvement of the traditional model? Answering this question calls for a review of the current state of computer use by horticulturists and a brief overview of the Internet computing environment.
Rapid communication has always been a key requirement, as well as fundamental characteristic, of scientific research (Schatz and Hardin, 1994). Many horticultural professionals, therefore, have readily accepted and begun to use currently available computer technologies linked to the Internet in order to facilitate this disciplinary requirement. Colleges and universities offer local area networks where, for example, library collections are computerized and searchable, usually from one's personal office computer. Library information systems invariably offer access to databases organized along broad disciplinary categories that enable searches of journals, dissertations, and print media titles. Electronic mail is beginning to be commonly used for communicating routine information throughout the immediate office environment. Once the e-mail habit is established, increased communication with colleagues at other institutions soon follows. Expanding upon the one-to-one nature of e-mail, electronic mailing lists link scholars having common interests in specialized topics and enable them to simultaneously communicate their latest discoveries to everyone in the group. Many of these electronic mailing lists, of which there are hundreds, are publicly announced but smaller groups sometimes form their own mailing lists to maintain privacy among a select group of colleagues working in a common area.
To facilitate the collaborative development of manuscripts among geographically dispersed scholars, many increasingly are turning to electronic file transfer. This capability enables spreadsheet and word processing documents, and even digitized electrophoretic protein gels to be transferred, worked on, or analyzed when received, thus eliminating delays in physically transmitting documents via the mail. This explosion in electronic communication alternatives has the effect of removing barriers to collaboration between geographically separated researchers, and increasing opportunities to access remote information from digital libraries and databases (Grimshaw, 1994).
While information acquisition is one of the principle benefits offered by the Internet environment, many educators may have avoided using Internet resources beyond basic services such as e-mail and library database searches because of the perception that the environment is too amorphous, consisting primarily of frivolous, trivial, extraneous, and difficult-to-access information. With so much "out there," being able to find information of value and relevance to one's work has been a significant weakness of the Internet. Technological solutions, however, are arriving in response to this critical need, and the cryptic technicalities of many aspects of Internet use are declining (Sunday Times, June 26, 1994). The Internet is rapidly progressing toward a more seamless environment, where the wealth of Internet-based information is presented as "the illusion of a single, very powerful computer, rather than a collection of disparate machines" (Grimshaw, 1994). These technical improvements have moved the Internet away from the esoteric tool it has traditionally been and opened its resources to whole new communities of users (Schatz and Hardin, 1994) .
ORIGINS OF THE INTERNET
The Internet originated during the 1960's under the direction of the US Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency. This initial network, ARPANET, linked the Pentagon with computers at UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. ARPANET was designed as a means of decentralizing US Defense computing resources in the event of a nuclear attack. By 1971, there were 15 sites connected, but the initial military goal of the network was being replaced with the more scientific goal of networked information exchange (ARPANET would cease to exist in 1990). By 1984, the number of host computers surpassed 1,000, and in 1986 involvement by the National Science Foundation sparked events which would result in the present configuration of the Internet. Under NSF coordination, linkage of thousands of universities occurred rapidly, starting first within the US and soon after throughout the world. The number of Internet hosts (a "host" is an individual computer linked to the Internet) broke 1,000,000 in 1992, and by July of 1995, hosts numbered 6.6 million.
Gopher Software
A pivotal advance in information acquisition and dissemination via the Internet occurred in 1991, with the release of Gopher software by the University of Minnesota. Prior to Gopher, accessing information generally required mastery of complicated operating commands to log into a remote host computer, whereupon one would have to literally root around through confusing layers of cryptically named file directories. For this reason, Internet users were primarily computer science and other computer-based professionals. Using Gopher, novice users could quickly move between layers of descriptively titled information categories with simple text-oriented interfaces or "point and click" commands. This development quickly opened up the Internet to many more scholars outside of computer science disciplines.
Associated with the release of Gopher was the development of sophisticated tools that permitted keyword searchers of Internet Gopher servers. For example, using a Gopher search tool such as Veronica and entering "horticulture" would return a listing of world-wide Gopher sites where the term "horticulture" figures as a part of the descriptive title of a specific informational resource. The information resources could range from descriptive plant lists, information about educational programs in horticulture, to Extension fact sheets. Gopher continues to be an important Internet resource today with over 7,000 Gopher servers on the Internet (Schatz and Hardin, 1994). In 1993, the annual growth rate of Gopher traffic on the Internet was 997%. However, in just three years time, Gopher has been supplanted by newer information retrieval tools. As one observer noted: "In the current tremendous expansion of the Net we have the opportunity to watch and study the growth of a fantastically huge new industry, on a scale similar to the building of the public highway systems, postal systems, telephone, railroad, and electrical infrastructure. (Hardy, 1993)
The World Wide Web and Mosaic
In 1989, two years before the release of Gopher, an initiative was launched by researchers at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland called the World Wide Web (WWW) project. The WWW "was originally developed to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups. Originally aimed at the High Energy Physics community, it has spread to other areas and attracted much interest" (WWW Summary Document, 1994). Basically, the Web consist of thousands of information resources located on a wide variety of computer systems and interconnected through hypertext links. The links, embedded within the body of the information being presented, contain computer addresses which connect one piece of information directly to another regardless of physical location. The resulting environment facilitates information dissemination of logically related subject matter in such a way that the user can navigate among many different network systems following a series of hypertext links. The WWW embodies the idea of "world-wide information space" (Schatz and Hardin, 1994), or seamless "enterprise-wide computing" (Grimshaw, 1994). The user is able to access information without the burden of technical considerations and irrespective of the location of the information in physical space. The end result is that the entire world of available Internet information resources exists as a streamlined total information space.
The CERN group began to release what are called "browser" programs during the early 1990's. Whereas with Gopher a user moves back and forth through hierarchical collections of information and ultimately arrives at a document which is the effective dead-end of that information search, the WWW and its hypertext links creates a potentially continuous environment of interlinked information resources. The hypertext/hypermedia environment made access to multimedia resources including text, sound, movies, and photos simple. Currently, the most widely used browser program is Netscape. Netscape has surpassed Mosaic, the first sophisticated browser program developed in 1993 at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), in acceptance and popularity due to the enhanced graphical features and ease of use it offers. During 1994, use of all browser programs grew 11 percent each week, and usage doubled every six weeks (Crawley, 1994). Both Netscape and NCSA's Mosaic are freely distributed on the Internet to all academic users. Commercial Internet providers, such as Prodigy, Compuserve, and America OnLine offer their own in-house Internet browsers.
From Browsing to Software Agents
Powerful World Wide Web search tools are being developed and new releases become available by the month. Some of these software "agents" have names such as Web worms, spiders, wanderers, crawlers, and snakes (Zakon, 1995). These agent programs are designed to autonomously search the Internet and locate information based on user-supplied search terms (Waldrop, 1994). At present, autonomous agent searches are only feasible for key words found in Web server names and limited searches of document page content, or to find servers located within specified geographical areas. In the future, computing advances will occur that permit greater specificity to information acquisition. Many of these advances, however, will require greater computing power than presently available, as well as advances in the bundling of data traveling on the Internet. While Netscape and Mosaic represent the present end-point advance in an on-going process, future development will bring greater power in information dissemination and acquisition capabilities. Ideally, scholars will be able to enter a string of very specific search terms, and have a "software agent" return customized information through a process termed interactive analysis (Schatz and Hardin, 1994). For example, one could query the Internet for "journal articles, greenhouse production, roses, nutrition, after 1992" and receive immediate access to extant full-text articles, with accompanying tables, graphs, and photographs. The National Science Foundation, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, and NASA have recently funded a four year $24.4 million effort in partnership with a consortium of leading universities and private sector corporations to develop systems for collecting, organizing, and storing digital information. These and other efforts will make a greater range of information more readily available to groups as varied as elementary school students to research scientists (Science, 1994).
Interest in and access to the Internet is also occurring in the general population. Scarcely a day goes by without a popular media reference to the Internet, or the so-called Information Superhighway. During 1993, business and media began to take notice of the Internet (Zakon, 1995). The most basic Internet service, electronic mail, has become a de facto requirement for progressive businesspeople. Estimates place the number having electronic mail capability at 25 million, with expectations that another 25 million people primarily from business will be linked to the Internet within the very near future (NY Times, June 19, 1994). A growing number of communities throughout the U.S. offer basic Internet services through community "free-nets," frequently administered through the public library system on terms similar in ease to signing up for a library card. Public access to Web servers, while not as available as e-mail, is increasing. As time progresses, public perception that more of the information they desire, the questions they have, or problems they wish to resolve will have Internet-based solutions will grow. For example, during a two week period in July of 1994, 1.4 million users visited a WWW server offered by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to view images and movies of Comet Shoemaker-Levy's impact with the planet Jupiter (http://newproducts.jpl.nasa.gov/sl9/sl9.html ). By September of 1995, 4.6 million web browsers had accessed NASA's information on the comet. Commuters in Southern California can access freeway system maps giving immediate readings on traffic flow speeds and plan their route home accordingly (http://www.scubed.com/caltrans/transnet. html).
Horticultural Information Resources
Many useful horticultural resources can be found today on the Internet. A listing of Gopher sites can be generated using Mosaic/Netscape and a search tool called "Search Gopher Space" (http://galaxy.einet.net/gopher/gopher.html). Entering the keyword "horticulture" returns over one hundred "hits," including the following Gopher servers: (a) the Virginia Tech Horticulture Department which provides monthly news releases; (b) the University of Missouri which provides Horticulture Guides; (c) Iowa State University which offers information on horticulture department curriculum, career opportunities, and faculty; (d) Michigan State and Auburn Universities which supply general informational releases on horticultural subjects; (e) the University of Minnesota which lists a directory of proposed House and Senate environmental legislation; (f) the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture which lists research being conducted at the Institute of Horticulture; and, (g) Penn State University which offers a variety of horticulture information resources. The weakness of gopher keyword searches, however, is that almost all returned Gopher information is text-only, and the lack of the hypertext links of WWW servers means that the relevance of information cannot always immediately be discerned from file names.
A handful of newly developed Web sites present horticultural, and related discipline, information. Two of the most comprehensive servers targeted for those interested in applied horticultural information are the Centre for Landscape Research at the University of Toronto (http://www.clr.toronto.edu:1080/clr.html) and the Australian National Botanic Gardens (http://155.187.10.12/index.html). The stated goal of the Centre for Landscape Research server is to encourage a "collaborative environment for the exploration of ideas relative to the design, planning, and policies of the environment" and "promote the use of electronic media to foster more informed decision-making." The Australian National Botanic Gardens server features activities and programs of the gardens and is strong in its presentation of photos of Australian flora. A third Web site, the University of Delaware Botanic Gardens (http://bluehen.ags.udel.edu/udgarden.html) offers the user a map of the garden's layout, photographic images, and identification information on selected species.
To date, there are 14 departmental-oriented web servers associated with programs offering undergraduate and graduate education in horticulture. Each of these servers generally provides curriculum information, course-specific information, announcements, research programs, listings or biographies of personnel, and links to other Web sites. These programs and their web addresses are presented below:
Department of Horticulture at Clemson University can be reached at (http://agweb.clemson.edu/Hort/HortMain. htm).
Department of Agronomy and Horticulture at New Mexico State University can be reached at (http://taipan.nmsu.edu/aght/agronomy.html).
Horticultural Sciences Department of Cornell University can be reached at (http://aruba.nysaes.cornell.edu:8000/ge neva.htm).
Department of Environmental Horticulture at UC Davis can be reached at (http://pubweb.ucdavis. edu/Documents/ENHORT/EHDEPT.HTM).
Department of Horticulture at Texas A&M; University can be reached at (http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/).
Department of Horticulture at The University of Illinois can be reached at (http://gopher.ag.uiuc.edu/Hort/ Horticulture.Home.Html).
Department of Horticultural Science at the University of Minnesota can be reached at(http://www.soils.umn.edu:8003/).
Department of Horticulture at University of Nebraska can be reached at (http://129.93.226.104).
Department of Plant and Soil Science at the University of Delaware can be reached at (http://bluehen.ags.udel.edu/ho mepage/plsc/plschome.html).
Department of Horticulture and Crop Science at The Ohio State University can be reached at (http://www.hcs.ohio-state.edu/hcs/hcs.html).
Horticulture Department at Purdue University can be reached at (http://newcrop.hort.purdue.edu/hort/hort.h tml).
Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida can be reached at (http://gnv.ifas.ufl.edu /WWW/AGATOR/HTM/HORTICUL.HTM).
Department of Horticultural Science at North Carolina State University can be reached at (http://www2.ncsu.edu/ncsu/ca ls/hort_sci/home/intro.html).
Department of Horticulture, Forestry and Recreation Resources at Kansas State University can be reached at (http://www.oznet.ksu.edu/dep/hfrr/wel come.html).
While these 14 sites provide valuable information on a variety of topics, the full potential of these new information resources will be realized when they begin to jointly develop and offer instructional, research, and/or outreach programs through their respective servers. Currently, an Internet user could sample information from each server but fail to arrive at a comprehensive view of the discipline of Horticulture.
IMPACTS ON THE TRADITIONAL MODEL
Given this overview of the Internet, what is the likely impact of Internet information resources on the traditional model of scholarly activity? A recent editorial in Science noted that "computers and computing have changed the modern world, but the effects on the practice of science have been especially profound" (Brauman, 1994). In scientific practice, increased computational power has permitted scientists to explore and analyze more intricate and complicated datasets, leading to greater complexity in the modeling of natural phenomena. These advances, along with access to a richer information matrix, represent, however, only a quantitative progression in the conduct of scientific enquiry. In this view, computers and the Internet are merely tools a scientist employs to enhance the quality of the scientific method of enquiry. The basic attribute of the scientific process, rigorous testing of hypotheses formulated through observations of natural phenomena, remains unchanged. There are nonetheless qualitative impacts on the disciplinary culture and conduct of science specific to Horticulture.
Four key elements in the discipline of Horticulture provide a strong incentive to use the Internet for computer-aided information acquisition and dissemination, and create a dynamic which will impact the traditional model. First, a strong visual component characterizes horticultural knowledge and study. Given that knowledge related to plant identification and utilization is central to the undergraduate curriculum and that there is no substitute for a high quality picture, most educators develop one or more slide sets to compliment their teaching programs. However, in most cases, when the professor changes institutions or retires these slide resources are generally lost. Fortunately, we are now seeing more plant image databases on the Web (example: Harvard Herbarium at (http://golgi.harvard.edu/). Professors are able to pull individual images from these databases and insert them into presentation software for classroom lectures. Alternatively, students can access these same resources out of class for review and self-study.
The second key element which links Horticulture to the Internet is the technical and practical element contained in the undergraduate curriculum which, similar to plant identification, requires that students are presented highly visual information. Examples are plant grafting techniques and growing medium preparation. The Web environment is very conducive to a type of instruction that is facilitated through the use of self-paced tutorials or lab assignments on subjects requiring step-by-step instructions, accompanied by audio and video clips to explain what is happening. An example of this type of interactive resource that a Web server can provide is the frog dissection tutorial available from the University of Virginia (http://curry.edschool.Virginia.EDU :80/~insttech/frog/).
The third element linking Horticulture to the Internet involves new efficiencies in the communication of information and research results. Research activity within some sub-disciplines of horticulture moves so rapidly that scholars' exclusive dependence upon the traditional publication cycle of a monthly or quarterly journal would prohibit them from keeping up with breaking developments. Horticulturists involved in biotechnology were among the early adopters of Internet communication. Through a commitment to rapid dissemination of research results via the Internet, these scientists are able to perform comparative searches on comprehensive databases and be fairly confident that the latest findings are included. An editorial in Science singled out the Journal of Biological Chemistry as an example of an on-line journal offering valuable features such as full-text articles, search engines to quickly and efficiently search contents for information, and a means to print out desired pages for extended examination (http://www-jbc.stanford.edu/jbc/). The editorial noted that in time the electronic journal may replace the printed scientific journal and result in accelerated scientific progress (Science, 1995). Similarly, in the area of providing information to industry and public client groups, use of the Internet to communicate late-breaking information about regulatory issues, environmental conditions, and/or disease outbreaks will emerge as a valuable disciplinary tool.
The fourth key element which links Horticulture to the Internet is the issue of format. For example, researchers involved in electrophoretic gel protein sequencing commonly use digitizing software to more precisely render and interpret sequences. Consequently, a traditional photographic rendition of a gel within the pages of a journal article offers less utility because the preferred format for greater accuracy in interpretive analysis is in digital format. These same scholars also rely heavily on Internet-based protein databases such as the University of Geneva's 2-D protein Electrophoretic Gel Database (http://expasy.hcuge.ch/ch2d/ch2d-top.html). In terms of information dissemination to industry professionals, format possibilities offered by the Internet include image-based maps showing the latest areas of insect or plant disease outbreaks, current soil moisture conditions, and quality of crop development. Each of these information resources, of course, depends on digitized format for both their creation and dissemination over the Internet.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE FUTURE
The Internet, or to define the issue more broadly to encompass advances in both telecommunications and computer software, provides scholars with opportunities for strengthening the discipline of horticulture in many ways. As previously discussed, the ability to network with colleagues using e-mail and electronic file transfer has brought people, ideas, and information together in a more efficient manner and enhanced collaborative efforts. As horticulturists develop Web servers to present teaching materials, course syllabi, research results, or late-breaking developments, they will collaborate more frequency with colleagues in other academic disciplines who have gone before them and discovered the pitfalls and challenges of developing information for the Internet. Likewise, discovering that colleagues have already developed similar courses and that their materials can be shared and accessed electronically provides many obvious benefits. As more and more secondary schools utilize instructional computer labs with Internet access, teachers logically will look to universities as sites for discipline-related curriculum materials to present to their students. Finally, continuing education programs and employee development programs will benefit from increased availability of curriculum materials and mini-courses developed for specific learning goals. As one observer noted: "Learning can be independent of time and place, and available at all stages of a person's life. The learning context will be technologically rich. Learners will have access not only to a wide range of media, but also to a wide range of sources of education" (Bates, 1993).
WHAT IS NEEDED?
French sociologist Jean-François Barbier Bouvet, who studies the impact of computers on society, wrote: "if in the past the culture of someone could be defined as the capacity to keep, memorize and recall information, today it should be defined as the capacity to wisely use information; in other words to be able to retrieve the information when it appears necessary" (Bouvet, 1993). In his view, incumbent on the practicing scientist will be recognition of the importance of integrating the intellectual products of scientific enquiry into the world-wide information space of the Internet. As horticulturists generate and disseminate research results within an information-rich environment using an evolving array of computer-based tools, there will be inevitable impacts on the traditional disciplinary model of scholarly activity, most notably in the area of self-publishing. Research scientists who rapidly communicate research results to world-wide communities of peers, and scholars who make their curriculum materials, lecture outlines, lab assignments, and self-paced tutorials available on the Internet, are in effect self-publishing. However, the Internet does not transmit merely to students and professional peers. As wider and more diverse groups of knowledge seekers discover the immediate availability of university generated information, they may ask for more. Given the advantages of timeliness, multimedia-compatibility, and ease of acquisition, horticulturists may soon be devoting increased amounts of time to electronic-publishing in order to satisfy an ever-growing demand for digital information. Extension professionals or private consultants may become less valued as people who have exclusive access to information, and more valuable as interpreters and synthesizers of information. This evolution toward an increased importance of Internet self-publishing may lead to the irony that the published journal article, the sine qua non of the traditional model of scholarly activity, could become less significant to many. This suggests that reevaluation and possible redefinition of standards of academic excellence are warranted.
At the same time, there is an obvious need for leadership to facilitate the development of electronic information resources. A coordinated effort, led either by ASHS or horticulturists working in the Internet environment, is needed to thoroughly assess and record horticulture resources on the Internet. This would minimize duplicative efforts and help give shape to the evolving presence and presentation of the discipline of horticulture on the Internet. Integral to this process is development of criteria for peer review evaluation for the purpose of maintaining professional standards. Much can be learned from colleagues in other fields that have been even faster to take up electronic publishing. If Internet activity is to be more widely adopted by horticulturists and accepted as a recognized and rewarded scholarly activity, identified standards and definitions of quality will be required.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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