Bruce Schatz, Professor Emeritus of Library Administration and Resident Professor at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, published a book with Cambridge Scholars Publishing in December 2024. The Evolution of the Net: Networked Infrastructure from Telephony to Telesophy “describes the technology for the Net, the global infrastructure whose goal is immediate interaction with all the world’s knowledge.” With accessible language and detailed explanations, Schatz presents the evolution of this technology for both working professionals and interested non-specialists. Uniquely, he frames The Evolution of the Net with personal stories of research projects, including his work on the Illinois Digital Library project.

“This book is important since it gives a coherent history of the Net. I was privileged to be present at the creation of browsing and searching in the past Internet, then pioneered the creation of analysis and synthesis for the future Interspace. The Net has become the Structure of the World, essential to enable ordinary persons to solve their problems,” states Schatz.

This publication is the latest achievement in a career that has spanned more than four decades, including 30 years at the University of Illinois. Schatz was the principal investigator of national flagship NSF projects in digital libraries, based in the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center. Schatz also served as professor and head of the Department of Medical Information Science in the College of Medicine. He is the author of the first technical book on using wearable and mobile devices to revolutionize medicine and public health and has published over 160 peer-reviewed articles. This book expands his 1997 Science article, “Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries: Bringing Search to the Net,” and his 2011 book (with Richard Berlin) Healthcare Infrastructure in their series on Health Informatics.