Several members of this journal's editorial advisory board give brief views on how they see the future of interlending and document supply. The article concludes with an overview of these contributions, together with additional comments by an editorial board member
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While the eighties of the last century were a time of local automation for libraries and the nineties the decade in which libraries embraced the Internet and the Web, now is the age in which the big search engines and institutional repositories are gaining a firm footing. This heralds a new era in both the evolution of scholarly communication and its agencies themselves, i.e. the libraries.
Until now libraries and publishers have developed a digital variant of existing processes and products, i.e. catalogues posted on the Web, scanned copies of articles, e–mail notification about acquisitions or expired lending periods, or traditional journals in a digital jacket. However, the new OAI repositories and services based upon them have given rise to entirely new processes and products, libraries transforming themselves into partners in setting up virtual learning environments, building an institution’s digital showcase, maintaining academics’ personal Web sites, designing refereed portals and — further into the future — taking part in organising virtual research environments or collaboratories. Libraries are set to metamorphose into ‘libratories’, an imaginary word to express their combined functions of library, repository and collaboratory. In such environments scholarly communication will be liberated from its current copyright bridle while its coverage will be both broader — including primary data, audiovisuals and dynamic models — and deeper, with cross–disciplinary analyses of methodologies and applications of instruments. Universities will make it compulsory to store in their institutional repositories the results of research conducted within their walls for purposes of academic reporting, review committees, and other modes of clarification and explanation. Big search engines will provide access to this profusion of information and organise its mass customization.
In the last decade technology exploded into libraries. It impacted not only library work processes but imported notions of project management and efficiency and resulted in catalogue sharing. The Internet, with Gopher and Veronica, brought co‐operation in the field of document supply and collection co‐ordination. The most consequential technology, however, is the Web. It combines instant publishing, hyperlinking, interactivity and multimediality and is so easy to apply. Numerous new actors will make their entry into the information chain which, of course, means competition. Libraries need to define their position in this Webbed world. They have to enter the marketplace at least partially, which transforms them into hybrid organizations, both vanguard and debatable.
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