Perhaps it's the fault of being liberally educated; I tend to find connections among the things I read. This week, everything I encounter seems to relate to feeling overwhelmed by a growing swarm of information in an information ecology that's on the brink of collapse.

Just as Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the University of California (UC) square off over what NPG considers a correction to an overly-generous discount and what university officials consider an egregious 300 percent increase in subscription prices at a time of financial crisis, several scholars writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education argue that far too much research is published, making it difficult to find (or to fund) scholarship that is significant. And Nicholas Carr, who thinks the Internet is rewiring our brains to make it nearly impossible to focus on any of it has just flown in the face of his own argument by expanding it from an article to book length. (Under the circumstances, wouldn't it have been easier for us to grasp what he's saying if he'd condensed it into a tweet instead?)

Technology to the rescue?
At any rate, all of these issues seem related, and none of them are new. Decades ago, H. G. Wells proposed that a universal encyclopedia could help citizens keep up with the otherwise unmanageable outpouring of information. "Both the assembling and the distribution of knowledge in the world at present are extremely ineffective," he wrote, "and thinkers of the forward-looking type whose ideas we are now considering, are beginning to realize that the most hopeful line for the development of our racial intelligence lies rather in the direction of creating a new world organ for the collection, indexing, summarizing and release of knowledge, than in any further tinkering with the highly conservative and resistant university system."

The new technology that would make this possible? No, not Wikipedia; microtext. Once knowledge was gathered, indexed, summarized, and miniaturized by teams of experts, the whole world could have access to the same body of information, and that access would dissolve boundaries, both intellectual and political. Wells insisted this development was not a "remote dream" but a practical goal, readily within reach and too important to postpone. Sadly, his argument that humanity could be united through a "World Brain" was published just two years before we chose instead to have a world war.

At the other end of that conflict, Vanevar Bush, a government scientist who helped organize the Manhattan Project, published an essay in which he also called upon the miracle of microtext to help us harness science for progress and gain control over the deluge of too much information. He wrote, "there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear." He envisioned a machine that would reduce the library to a desk-sized storage bank, complete with retrieval mechanisms, indexing, and a function for building personalized "trails of association" that would pull knowledge together. This "Memex" machine could be an instrument of peace. He concluded:

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory . . . He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome.

An unfortunate stage, indeed; the article was published one month before big science gave us its first public product: the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We still haven't quite worked out the perfect mechanism for gathering and sorting the world's knowledge, but it turns out it's not so much a technical problem as it is a cultural and economic one.

It's the intellectual property, stupid
UC's threat to boycott NPG publications, which arguably offer the most prestigious filters of scientific research, raises several issues that both Wells and Bush alluded to, but which could not be solved with the miracle of microtext—or with the development of the Internet, which enables both the Memex's trails of association and the World Brain's global reach. We're still producing an unwieldy amount of research, and much as we try, we haven't really found the perfect way to store, filter, and find meaningful patterns in it.

Both Wells and Bush had great faith that technology and superior indexing would solve these problems, but they didn't take into account these more complex issues:

• Research productivity is measured by the number of publications a scholar can produce multiplied by the prestige of the publisher; the usefulness or originality of the scholar's work doesn't factor into the equation. (And no wonder; as many of those who commented on the Chronicle article pointed out, it's devilishly difficult to predict which research will turn out to be important in the long run.)
• Publishers have become our gatekeepers for deciding which scholars should get grant funding and promotions, and have parlayed that vetting function into tremendous market value. Publishers have also created secondary channels for everything that doesn't make it through the gates, which is also profitable.
• Libraries have said for decades they can no longer afford to buy all of these publications. Yet they trim and tuck and somehow make do.
• Scholars know a lot about which publications matter within their disciplines and submit their work accordingly. They do not have librarians' sense of the knowledge ecosystem, and without that understanding they aren't quite sure who's at fault when the library can't provide the books and articles they want. But they're far too busy producing more books and papers to attend some workshop on open access or to upload their work to an institutional repository.

Bypassing the phantom tollbooth
What both Wells and Bush failed to take into account was that the knowledge they envisioned as a guide for human progress would become intellectual property, available only to those who can pay for it. They also underestimated the pull that self-interest has on decisions each of us makes as we pursue our careers.

The battle between NPG and UC brings to mind another crisis, that dark plume billowing a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. It's horrifying to watch the disaster unfold, frustrating to feel so helpless as one technological solution after another fails. It's no wonder people want to take action by boycotting British Petroleum. Yet somehow, most of us fail to connect the disaster in the Gulf with our personal choice to drive to work instead of walking, or our decision to buy a product shipped from the other side of the world because it's a little cheaper.

The possible boycott of one publisher has dramatized the peculiar way that our advances in knowledge are held up at the tollgates as we give our research to corporations in exchange for personal advancement. It's a problem that doesn't just afflict the sciences, it affects everyone who uses a library or seeks a venue for their scholarship. If we're really going to make changes, we have to look far beyond one institution and one publisher. A solution has to involve scholars in every discipline changing the way we do things at the individual level. We'll have to boycott our own self-interest. We'll have to do things that, in the short term, seem risky for our careers. In the end, failing to make those choices is what's really holding us back.

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), has just been published by Minotaur Books.