When he founded the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson had a vision that culminated in the creation of the Academic Village. This vision expressed his desire for an integrated educational environment, the encouragement of intellectual exchange across interdisciplinary boundaries, and the cooperative pursuit of knowledge. The acceptance of the Internet, or Web, into mainstream culture can be seen to elevate Jefferson's vision to a whole new level. Although it has been around for some time, this recent popularization of online sources has numerous implications for the means and breadth of the academic pursuit of knowledge. The World Wide Web is an infrastructure of images, audio bits, and text. Unlike other sources that contain this type of information, the Web is accessible to the public and is characterized by so-called hyperlinks. A hyperlink is a connection point, or trace, between one Web document and another. This differs from similarly structured stand-alone modules, such as CD Roms, in that the information accessible is virtually unlimited. A person surfing, or surfing, the Web can follow infinite hypertext connections without any preordained trajectory. This nature of the Web creates a “virtually infinite lateral connection to other [Web] archives” (Unsworth 6, “Electronic Scholarship”). Another unique feature of the Web, compared to traditional academic texts, is its ability to present multimedia information. Not only can it create text-based documents as already found in book and computer formats, but it can store and display both visual and audio bits. While for some texts these options may simply be a nice, but unnecessary extra, for others they are central to the text. In Jerome McGann's essay "The Rationale of HyperText" he provides the following example: "Burn's work is grounded in an oral and musical tradition. Print editions are incompetent in rendering that most basic feature of his verse..., [in their] inability to preserve the memory of his work in living forms" (3-4). Academic research has traditionally been intricately involved with printed text, so “the scale of the tools [has] seriously limit[ed] the possible outcomes” (McGann 2, “Rationale for HT”). Not only are actual books cumbersome when moving from one document to the next, but some texts are "rare and can be quite expensive" (McGann 3, "Radiant Textualities"). With the help of the Web and its hyperlinks, documents are linked in complex and manageable ways unimaginable in previous printed formats.