What's Next?

THE NEXT THING IS SOUND, images, video," said Hossfeld, "as well as the eternal search for more resources and materials to computerize." She admitted, however, that not everything can be recorded digitally. "The Hood Museum has a whole bunch of things we probably can't record. You look at them, you don't read about them. You even want to see it dynamically—walk around it and see all the different angles and lighting." And the network must be speeded up to handle the vastly greater volume of data; the digitized version of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture takes up as much space as the first eight volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica in pure text. With the cables that exist at Dartmouth, these data would travel too slowly. "The behind the scenes challenge right now is just that," said Hossfeld. "Faster is always better."