As the World Wide Web provides more and more information, and a seemingly endless number of books and articles transmogrify to the digital domain, it will be easy to forget these cyber-libraries don't constitute the sum total of human knowledge -- or even a healthy fraction of it.

"There's always going to be a large segment of material locked up in traditional ink and paper," says Greg Leazer, a UCLA assistant professor of information studies.

There are literally tons of books still in their original type faces buried in the basements of the British National Library alone, not to mentions thousands upon thousands of titles in the Library of Congress that have never seen a ".com." Even the experts agree it will be a long, long time -- if ever -- before the Internet is able to provide access to that information, our human institutional memory, as it were. But Leazer nonetheless believes it should be able to tell scientists, faculty, students and anyone else interested in doing comprehensive research what material does exist out there -- both electronic and in ink -- and how to find it. In fact, Leazer has dedicated his research to exploring search-engine-like technologies that could do just that for scholarly books and research papers.

"The Internet will have tons of digital libraries and Web sites, from publishers, libraries and scholarly organizations," Leazer points out. "But you can provide a very important service if you can tell users that a book they might want to use is available in the building next door or downtown at the public library." Or even across the ocean.

Leazer, who has master's and doctoral degrees in library and information studies from Columbia University, spent a year working on information systems for the New York Public Library before coming to UCLA in 1994. Since then, his plan has been to develop an intelligent search agent that will investigate digital libraries, traditional libraries, museum resources and anything else that might be relevant to a particular query -- and will do it without getting stymied by the varying formats it might find in the search.

The idea came, in part, from Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the book Being Digital. "Negroponte's vision is that individuals will have some sort of intelligent or user-directed search software that can go out and simultaneously contact individual collections, return back a coherent view of what's available, then make a single presentation of the results," explains Leazer.

Leazer began his project in earnest a year ago, armed with a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a customized research system that will query a range of individual collections and return the results of the search in a single, straightforward presentation. While the project is still in a preliminary stage, he already has a vision of what the finished product will be like.

"You turn on your computer and pull up a Web page, input your query and the software not only looks at your query but knows something about you as well, which helps guide it on its search," explains Leazer. "It then figures out which repositories are likely to have the relevant information. Maybe it's the digital library at the Association for Computing Machinery and a couple of journals published by Oxford University Press that have been helpful to you in the past. And maybe it will go to the digital catalogs for the UCLA Library and the Los Angeles Public Library because it knows they're nearby. So it will search those collections and, having done that, bring back citations for the resources it has located, noting whether they're on-line, in the stacks, in microfiche, whether or not there's a fee, whatever."

And what's the biggest obstacle to Leazer's dream at present? finding qualified students with a talent for programming and an understanding of the complexity of the information environment. And then, of course, there's that other little bugaboo his colleagues are all too familiar with: "the frustrations of making the machines do what you want them to do."

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