A few years ago, during a typical, tired, end-of-the-conference plenary session the hundred or so people in the room suddenly sat up and peered around at each other in shocked recognition. Until that moment, we had been in a room of librarians, publishers, and faculty of various and sundry academic specialties. We had just discovered that, for some years we had all been encountering the same problems and seeking answers to the same basic questions about communication among scholars. In that moment we all experienced an instant of electricity; despite our varied disciplinary focuses we realized we were of the same tribe.

The conference was the 1991 Faxon Institute for Advanced Studies in Scholarly and Scientific Communication. Represented at the conference were people from fields as diverse asclassics, computer science, and journalism. We had each been attracted to separate elements of the topics covered in the conference: new electronic publishing trends for academic works, new opportunities in online journals, new instructional technologies.

What we all suddenly acknowledged during the plenary group discussion was a realization that we had come to the conference like the fabled blind men to the elephant, focusing on different aspects of something that was actually a much larger whole. We were all encountering dramatic problems and new opportunities in a broad area that was being called scholarly communication. We all had different approaches and insights into this new area. Especially interesting were the approaches that centered on this new fangled thing called The Internet. Our insights into the beast were fascinating to each other. But unlike the elephant of the blind men, our beast was not calmly submitting itself for our study. It was rampaging through our villages, terrifying us with daily stresses, and generally rocking our world.