Wilfrid Laurier University Scholars Commons @ Laurier Library Publications Library 3-1999 The Nature of Hypertext: Background and Implications for Librarians Deborah Wills Wilfrid Laurier University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/lib_pub Recommended Citation Wills, Deborah, "The Nature of Hypertext: Background and Implications for Librarians" (1999). Library Publications. 8. https://scholars.wlu.ca/lib_pub/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Library at Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Library Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE NATURE OF HYPERTEXT: BACKGROUND AND IMPLICATIONS FOR LIBRARIANS There has been much talk in recent years about the way electronic information is breaking down the walls of the traditional library, muddying the boundary between what is owned in the library building and what can be accessed from the larger world. However, the advent of electronic hypertext is causing another kind of "breakdown," this time among individual texts. Hypertext allows connections among words or phrases in an electronic environment: highlighted text in one document links directly to other documents or to other parts of the same document. Given the flexibility of hypertext, a group of texts can form a highly complex environment with multiple paths for reading and understanding. The boundaries between individual texts, so easy to identify in the print environment, therefore lose their meaning. Hypertext is affecting the way users read, write, and think about information. Hypertext has been used in various environments, the most familiar being the World Wide Web: a space to which any individual or organization, with the appropriate computer connections, may add documents and links connecting documents.