The meter's video display screen is designed for dwarves -- the man has to hunch down nearly double to read it, and even then, the instructions are illegible in the bright spring sun. He confers worriedly with the woman. Even after the instructions are deciphered, they don't make much sense.

"This is a really poor UI," says the man. The woman nods.

At Stanford, you can expect perfect strangers to understand that when you say "UI," you mean "user interface." No doubt there are other campuses which boast disproportionately high technologically literate populations -- MIT and Carnegie-Mellon spring to mind -- but at Stanford the connection runs deeper. Stanford University is a central wellspring of Silicon Valley innovation and inspiration. The current cultural ascendance of techno-capitalism can, in part, be traced directly here, to a university where familiarity with the ways of venture capital begins well before enrollment in Econ 101, and where computer science undergraduates often come to their first class with a business plan already in hand.

The discussion of the parking meter's user interface enthralls me as I wait my turn to pay on a fine May morning. I have come to Stanford to learn about the university's plans to create an archive for the history of Silicon Valley. There's a nicely recursive, snake-eating-its-own-tail aspect to the project. Stanford is attempting to capture the history of an era in which the university itself has been -- and continues to be -- an integral player. It's no accident that random visitors are worrying about high-tech user interfaces: Such concerns are the stuff of life itself here, in the heart of the valley.

As I am soon to discover, Stanford's Silicon Valley archive project is just one part of a larger struggle waged by Stanford librarians to figure out the proper role of a research library in the digital age -- to devise, on a grand scale, a state-of-the-art user interface that will solve not just the problem of exploding information overload, but also the dilemma of how to nail down the history of a place that prides itself on constant change. And as is appropriate for an institution like Stanford, the question isn't merely academic -- any new solutions to the problems of information access are bound to be fertile ground for the next generation of valley start-ups. There is always new history to be made.

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