Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 August 2005
IF SCHOLARS have a role model, he might be Umberto Eco's Brother William of Baskerville. Certainly our notion of the activity of scholarship–an investigator reading in a great library, alive to the treasures collected there–altered little from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century and still persists at the beginning of the twenty-first; but by the end of this century, the practice of scholarship will have changed utterly, and the scholar will require quite different skills from those that graduate students are being equipped with today.