Good afternoon. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of this very special day for today’s graduates.

Early in my adult life, after I had completed three years working for the government in a job where I never had to decide what to wear, I went to work for a university. I actually went to work for the alumni office; they’re the people who take a four-year fling and try to stretch it out to a life-long love affair. One of my responsibilities involved reunions. While most classes celebrated five-year anniversaries at a special reunion weekend, those returning for their 50th reunion came at the same time as graduation and always were seated in the front row at the commencement ceremony. Consequently, I attended more than my share of commencement addresses. Do you want to know what I remember about these speeches? Not one single thing!

It was this humbling thought that came to mind as I prepared for this afternoon’s event. It occurred to me that of all the various graduation speeches I have heard, only one has found a place in my active memory, and that is just a single line from a speech I did not even attend; I heard about it in the next day’s TV news. In the spring of 1962, as I was looking forward to attending Georgetown University in the fall, Bob Hope appeared at Georgetown’s commencement as both a speaker and parent of one of the graduates. In the single sound bite reported in the news he said something like this: For all you students who are about to leave the campus and go out into the real world, I have two words of advice: Don’t go!

I say all this by means of dispensation. In future years, you will not recall who spoke at this graduation ceremony or what he – I mean, I – said. And that’s okay. But I can assure you, that when you look back at these times, you will recall the intensive immersion you had in the information technologies of today, and you will look at that experience with a combination of awe and disbelief. In 1999, as I use my own personal computer which sits on a desk, I realize that the memory in that machine is a thousand times greater than the room-filling IBM computer I cut my programming teeth on a quarter century ago. And the three giant disk packs that we had to physically load on the computer to run programs on the alumni records held as much data as would now fit in less than one percent of the hard disk I installed in my desktop computer last year. I still remember the feeling of power the first time I brought a 20-pound portable terminal home and was able to connect to the University’s computer at the blazing speed of 300 baud.

I look back this quarter century not to bore you with my nostalgic meanderings, but rather to warn you that all we have today in terms of information technology – the world wide web, high-speed broadband communications, multi-media computers, e-commerce, and the rest – may look, will look, just as prehistoric as my IBM 360 and 300 baud terminal when you are celebrating your 25th reunion in 2024.

Of course, predicting exactly what the technology of that time will be and how it will make today’s technology look antique is another question. If I could do that, I probably wouldn’t be here right now. I think I’d be in a meeting with my bankers discussing the timing of my next IPO.

Predicting the future is never easy, especially in these times when someone (and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Yogi Berra, though it should have been) said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” A recent cartoon in the New Yorker showed two young students in a locker room with one saying to the other, “I’m hoping that what I am going to be when I grow up hasn’t been invented yet.” With the complexity of today’s life just a precursor of tomorrow, we can be pretty sure that that the wish of that student in the cartoon will come true – and may, in fact, come true more than one time!

I, however, will be brave and make two predictions this afternoon. If we want to set the horizon at a quarter century, we can plan to get together in 2024to grade my predictions; today’s graduates will be returning to College Park to celebrate their silver reunion, and I’ll be marking my first year as an octogenarian.

The first prediction represents a belief I’ve held a long time. My entire professional career has involved information management and information policy. I do not have a library degree and have never worked as a librarian. Yet I have great respect for that role and great confidence in its continued importance.

So my first prediction is that today’s graduates, whatever the actual denomination of career positions you occupy, will carry forward the honorable traditions of librarianship and will play an indispensable role as information managers. Information technology will continue to change in unimagined ways, but the need for educated professionals who can understand information content and context will not abate. I remain confident that even for the jobs that haven’t been invented yet, people filling those jobs will rely on information and knowledge to perform them, and librarians will be there to help them.

Now, I’ll admit this prediction needs a little help to come true. We all know that there are people who predict the demise of the library profession. “Why, “ they ask, “do you need librarians and libraries when the Internet provides direct access for end users to all the information one could possibly want?” Why, indeed? Do these people realize that the vast majority of the world’s knowledge has not been digitized and therefore is not available on the Internet? Do they understand that the Internet is a vast unregulated depository where information of questionable quality can reside next to information of exceptional quality fully refereed by renowned experts? Do they appreciate that the access to the Internet they take so much for granted is still a far-away wish to the preponderance of the world’s population and even to a majority of the population in this country?

Certainly, the Internet has profoundly changed the information landscape, but, I would argue, it has made the need for well-educated information specialists even more profound. No matter what these specialists call themselves, I still think of them as librarians and know they share the common heritage of that profession. When you hear someone claim that the Internet obviates the need for librarians, don’t just shrug your shoulders. Confront that person and let them know the vital role you play.

My second prediction also foresees a sort of constancy in the face of profound technological change. Here I’m concerned with information policy. As a former member and, now, as executive director of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, I spend much of my time dealing with information policy. I know that today’s graduate may have learned about the Commission in their educational program, but for the sake of others in the audience let me describe it. The Commission, or NCLIS as we acronym lovers inside the Beltway call it, is a permanent Federal agency, established in 1970 and comprised of Presidential appointees approved by the Senate who meet on a part-time basis to provide policy advice about the library and information needs of the nation.

Let me again take you back nearly a quarter of a century when I first landed on the shores of information policy. I quickly noticed that the federal government had established a number of temporary commissions to deal with various hot topics in the area of information policy. The Privacy Protection Study Commission, the Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works, the Electronic Funds Transfer Commission and the Federal Paperwork Commission were all addressing their particular topics, and they were all nearing completion of their work. I began to worry whether I had entered a field where the problems were all about to be solved and there would be nothing left for me to do.

I can assure you now that my worries were for naught. The various commissions wrapped up their work, produced their reports, made their recommendations for policy changes, and closed their doors, but today, more than two decades later, policy concerns about privacy, intellectual property, e-commerce, and government information practices still consume policy wonks like me. I can assure you that 25 years from now, the same concerns, albeit in a different technological environment, will still be on the table.

So let me now, in the concluding part of this talk, turn to some of the issues in information policy that will impinge on your professional lives in the years ahead. Let me also share my belief that with these issues, as with so many policy issues, there is no absolute right position, and as always, the process of developing consensus calls for a willingness on the parts of advocates of varying positions to understand the interests of their opponents and to yield gracefully on their own less vital interests.

My own cosmology of information policy issues comprises four categories with an additional area that could either be considered as a fifth category or as an overlay for the first four. The initial categories are information economics, individual rights, information equity, and government information resources. The overlay is the international dimension of all these four topics, about which much could be said, but I will leave that for another occasion.

As students of the organization of information, you will recognize that any classification scheme is imperfect and that individual topics often can be assigned to more than one category. Certainly that is true with my categories, but with that caveat aside, let me describe them with just a little more detail.

The first of these categories, information economics, addresses a host of issues dealing with the role of information and information technology in the economy. Here we address not only how information about goods and markets and monetary systems underpin a global information framework, but also how information itself is a key and expanding element of commerce. Copyright, piracy, trans-border barriers to trade are some of the issues in this category, but also Federal assistance to libraries, tax policy for users of information and information technology, postal rates and inventory rules for publishers are in this category. To my way of thinking, personal privacy is also an issue here, because I see the privacy issue as fundamentally a question of how much detail about myself I am willing to surrender in order for the marketplace of goods to operate more efficiently and to prevent the waste of marketing resources to attempt to sell me goods that are clearly not of interest to me.

Others, however, may feel personal privacy falls in the second broad category, that is individual rights. In terms of information policy, this category contains the fundamental First Amendment rights to be informed, i.e., freedom of speech and of the press, and to apply information to public discourse through rallies and lobbying. It also is where problems of censorship are addressed and the corresponding right claimed by many to be free of exposure to images and ideas considered pornographic or otherwise objectionable. One of the most nettlesome topics in this area – which I will not address in any detail – is the concern of parents about material their children can access on Internet terminals in their local public and school libraries. NCLIS has produced a very helpful brochure addressing this issue.

The third category, information equity, has recently gained the marketing sobriquet of the “digital divide.” Here is where the debate takes place about who will benefit from the information age and who will be left behind. From the earliest days of the Clinton-Gore administration, it was made clear that the Administration was committed to a telecommunications policy that did not lead to a society split between “information-haves” and “information have-nots.” It was because of this belief, and driven partially by statistics collected by NCLIS on the role of public libraries in providing Internet access, that the recent Telecommunications Act, created a universal services fund that provides unprecedented levels of financial support to connect libraries (and other public institutions) to the Internet.

In recent days, the White House has announced its continuing commitment to information equity issues. The President met with leaders of a number of technology and not-for-profit organizations to discuss narrowing the digital divide. The digital divide is the shorthand term that describes the fact that as Internet access from the home grows, it grows significantly slower in the homes of poor people and certain racial minorities. Following the meeting, the President issued a memorandum to agencies directing increased efforts in addressing the digital divide. He also, last Friday, issued two more memoranda dealing with how technology can improve governmental services and society in general. In recent speeches, President Clinton has wondered aloud how society would be improved if individual access to the Internet was as ubiquitous as current access to telephone service.

The final information policy category deals with government information resources. This nation’s approach to government information is a shining star and the envy of nations around the world. We believe that information developed by taxpayers belongs to all of us. This belief is contained in a number of statutory provisions, most notably the Freedom of Information Act, the Depository Library Act, and in the prohibition in the Copyright Act which forbids the Federal government, except in the most narrow of circumstances, from claiming copyright in any information created by the government. In my opinion, this prohibition should also extend to state and local government, but we’ll have to debate that issue another day.

Amazingly complex challenges face policy makers today who deal with government information. Without doubt, the World Wide Web has opened many new channels for citizen access to the information holdings of various government agencies. But new questions arise. What is a publication? If a publication only appears on an agency’s web site, how do users of depository libraries know of its existence? If an agency removes information from its web site, how can future scholars gain access to it? Equally important, how can they even know that the information was ever made available by the agency and how it was portrayed?

For graduates of an institution like the University of Maryland, which has such a close working relationship with our National Archives, you will appreciate additional policy problems. Agency records are defined by law as either providing evidence of transactions of the agency or having intrinsic informational value. How does this definition apply to the millions of characters of electronic mail and other files created on the desktop computers of federal workers every day? As senior policy maker shape new approaches to problems, do they retain early drafts and the comments on those drafts received from colleagues and constituents, so that future researchers can understand the genesis of policy redirection?

These few questions just scratch the surface but I hope they have whetted your appetite. I imagine that many of today’s graduates will choose operational careers unconnected with the development of national information policy. You will face thorny internal policy issues no matter where you find yourself because that is just the nature of today’s information landscape. However, I want to urge that you never lose sight of the broad policy issues I have briefly sketched today. As citizens, you have a responsibility to be engaged in the operations of a government whose fundamental charter begins with the words “We the People.” But more so, as educated and practicing information professionals, you will bring a special knowledge and competence to the discussion and resolution of these issues.

Therefore, in conclusion, I assure you that I will not be bothered if you don’t remember me and this speech. Abraham Lincoln – very incorrectly, as it turned out – dropped the following words into one of his addresses: “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.” That phrase describes most of the speeches you will hear throughout your life.

But I do hope you will remember the special role you can play when this nation, and this world, tackle the thorny issues surrounding information policy as technological innovations beyond our ability to imagine continue to be made available to us on almost a daily basis. Again, I thank you for letting me play a small role in this very special day. I offer my congratulations to all the graduates, and also my best wishes to the friends and family here today, without whom this day might never have arrived. See you in 2024!