Sonderband 2. International Council on Archives. Dritte Europäische Archivkonferenz, Wien 11. bis 15. Mai 1993. Tagungsprotokolle (1996)
4. Session / Séance. Strategies for Links with Historical Research / Stratégies de Communication envers la Recherche historique - Gonzalez, Pedro: Data Bases and Long Distance Communication. A Spanish Éxperience / Bases de données et information a distance. Une expérience des archives espagnoles (english 319 - français 343)
4. Session/Séance: Gonzâlez, Data Bases and long distance Communcation possible for new conditions in the relationships between researchers to evolve: they will be able to inform their colleagues of their work, or ask the opinions and comments of other colleagues all over the world, even though they do not know each other personally. Joining the resources provided by Telecommunication with those of computing has even lead to the appearance of the concept of Telecomputing or Telematics - the union of Telecommunications and Computing - which facilitates the processing, collection, treatment and distribution of remote information. The definitive mass use of new technological advances such as fibre optics will enable fabulous quantities of information to be sent to any part of the world almost instantaneously. The new American network project, the National Research and Education Network (NREN), expects to have 1 Gb per second data transmission capacity by 1995, which would enable it to send several tens of thousands of pages per second from one part of the network to another. This is what has been called the „erosion of time and geography“1, the breaking down of geographical and time barriers within the world of information, making possible immediate interconnection of the different computing resources through more and more powerful link networks, so that both information and computers’ ability to store and process it may be shared and more effectively utilized. Intercommunication of the entire academic world offers new opportunities for research which up till now were pure utopia. The concept of „connectivity“ refers to this new situation: computers intercommunicate and exchange information, researchers who use these media in some way are able to work together, even though they are a great distance from each other; they may widely distribute the results of their work and at the same time immediately benefit from the results of the work of their colleagues’ all over the world, establishing relationships between them of a type which could scarcely be imagined a few years ago. Today’s researcher may instantaneously have access in his work centre to large quantities of information obtained in online systems or edited in the form of electronic publications, including information in the form of text, visual information and sound etc. all at the same time. He may also rapidly contact his colleagues from other places through electronic mail. The use of discussion fora through this system of electronic mail is beginning to spread, making it possible to seek opinions, send comments or suggestions to any researcher interested in the same subjects and with whom it was formerly difficult to have any contact other than at the various international congresses. Historical research has not been a pioneer in this new situation (it must be taken into account that computing was conceived, above all, for processing numbers and carrying out mathematical operations at great speed), but little by little this field is 1 F inholt, Tom: The Erosion of time, Geography and Hierarchy: Sharing information through an electronic archive. Paper for the Symposium on the Impact of Information Technologies on Information Handling in Offices and Archives. Marburg, 17-19 Octobre, 1991. 320
