"I don't
need the library, it's too big, too complicated, and anyway,
everything worth having is on the Internet," the bright eager
undergraduate answered the ancient faculty member who recommended
using the library.

"Anyway,
the library's catalog is on-line, and I can look at it if I need
stuff." She concluded.

"But maybe
you'll need one of the real books that they have in the
library," the old professor suggested.

"Maybe," she conceded, "but probably not, and anyway,
if there's a source on line, I'll always use it before anything in
the library." (1)

Conversations
like this appear with increasing frequency among academics bridging
the generational divides. Students increasingly see the library as
mostly irrelevant, while faculty and librarians of a certain age
cling to the security of an authoritative collection and familiar
classification systems. Brought up on the web and the endless flow
of marginally organized information that is CNN, MTV or ESPN --a
flow that makes almost no distinction between the important and the
trivial, fact and speculation, authority and gossip-- students have
little patience with the formal organizational structure of the
library and the authority of the librarian.

We, whose
introduction to libraries preceded the computerized card catalog
and thus truly obsolete dinosaurs of the emerging digital age, live
by a hierarchical information model. We think of information as
organized and structured taxonomies of sources; we understand the
difference between government documents and rare books, between the
US history and Latin American history sources, and we expect to
find these materials in their appropriate, separately structured
locations in our libraries. We think that science and art, business
and literature inhabit different information spaces. Educated in a
world dominated by the physicality of libraries, from the
neighborhood public libraries to college libraries and the great
international research libraries, we think of information as
residing in a particular place.

I know about

the New York Public Library, the Lilly Library, the Bancroft
Library, the Nettie Lee Benson Library, the Library of Congress,
and the Bodelian Library. Each one is in my imagination as a
physical place with its own personality that tells me what sources
I can expect to find within its walls. I have a mental map of each
one's physical layout, a memory of its organizational peculiarities
and cataloging quirks. The advent of the computerized card catalog
did not disabuse me of this mental map for these digital artifacts
simply reproduced in a more convenient way most of the same
information that resided on what now appears charming and quaint
library cards.

To my
students, this recitation is as picturesque, decorative, and
ultimately useless as the artifacts scattered about the restaurant
chains of America, the washboards and kerosene lanterns, the Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco signs, and the other impedimenta of
a lost age. They indulge my reminiscence, for after all, I will
give them a grade, but I can see in their eyes the same bemused
tolerance I gave my grandparents when they talked about the
procedure for hand cranking their Model T.

Nonetheless,
for all of the digital progress we have seen, this generation and
the next (and in universities the time span for generational change
is four to six years) will continue to find that libraries remain
imposing buildings that house relics of a past age. These library
monuments already serve as places to study, places to get online at
a computer laboratory, places for the social rituals of female-male
bonding that constitute so much of college life. Some students
pursuing difficult projects will ask a librarian for help, others
will use reserve books forced on them by old fashioned professors,
and advanced graduate students may actually recognize the value of
the materials collected and managed within their university's
physical library.

Yet the
activity of the traditional library takes place within uneasy
hearing distance of the current trendy mantra anticipating the
total digitization of human knowledge, whatever its original form

(print, manuscript, picture, sound, or digital representation). The
library, we hear, is pretty much over unless it can remake itself
into an academic Yahoo, an intellectual Google, or
some other competitive hyper-textualized, multi-threaded, linked,
digital resource.

What are
librarians to do and what should their universities
think?

For one thing,
we stopped building the buildings. In most universities, this
aversion to physical library space began in the mid 1980s at least
and grew into a full-blown phobia by the end of the 1990s. Talk to
a university president about expanding the library, and you get
this conversation.

Laments the
librarian, "We need more library space, the books are filling
our existing space and the patrons have no place to sit and study
or read. We will be out of space by June two years
hence."

"How much
new space do we need?" asks a cautious president.

"Oh," says the librarian with confidence, recounting the results of
endless planning committees and design workshops, "x-zillion
square feet at multi-hundred of dollars a square foot. After all,
library buildings require good air conditioning, strong
foundations, special shelves and lighting, and lots of
security."

"So, this
is what, $80 million, $100 million?" asks the president, now
fully alert.

"Something
on that order," responds the librarian.

"And this
new space," the president asks, "How long will it be
adequate for the library's needs?"

This honest if
foolish librarian responds, "Oh, until the time the building is
built and occupied, then we'll need to plan for more
space."

Desperate to
exit this conversation, the president asks, "And how much of the
collection housed in this space is used in any one
year?"

"About
1/3," reports the still honest librarian.

Seeing an
escape route, the president proposes, "Let's put the unused
2/3's of the collection in a warehouse and get it when someone
wants it. Then we won't need the new space."

Familiar with
the ways of university politics, the librarian admonishes the
president, "Oh, but the faculty won't like it. When they want a
book they want it now and they want to browse the
stacks."

No amateur in
university politics either, the president counters, "OK, I'll
take the library building plan to the faculty and ask the following
questions and we will see what the faculty think."

Herewith
the questionnaire to the faculty:

"The University has $80 million in
construction funds. Which one of the following projects should have
the highest priority?

Recognizing defeat for the moment, the
librarian begins planning to expand remote storage. We do not build
new library space much anymore unless for computer centers, for
computer labs, for classroom and seminar space, or for study halls.
The books go into remote storage, the computer catalog lets us
recall them on a 24-hour or better turnaround, and complaints about
this policy barely rise to the audible.

Every year I take my students in an
advanced history class to the library for a show and tell. You
might think they would know where it is and how it works, but in
fact, for many, it is new news. Sure, they know where it is, they
have been there to get a reserve book or meet their boyfriend, but
the book part of the library is not much relevant to their academic
lives. We do the show and tell, and each year it has more and more
computer content, more and more computer indices, digitized finding
aids, digital representations of journal articles, online access to
newspapers, whatever you can imagine.

My librarian friend, who does this for me
every year, now brings in at least two physical items. One is a
periodical index (bound, real pages, small print, authoritative,
structured) and one is a government document of some kind. He does
a great job, and when it is over, some of the students come up and
look at these physical objects, with the curiosity of the museum
visitor. "What quaint things," they seem to say, but out of respect
for my white hair, they do not speak these thoughts aloud. They
pick the books up and handle them, as you would look at a hand
powered wringer washer in the local museum: interested, curious,
but not relevant to your daily life.

Then they go on with their work, on-line,
on the Internet, each year the density of their digital experiences
and abilities greater and greater, and their familiarity with the
physical library less and less.  "#2">(2)

Do they read physical books? Of course
they do. They buy and read paperbacks of all kinds, they read the
student newspaper, they buy how-to-do-it and self-improvement
books. The library, though, that is something else again. It is
there, it can be useful, but it is not at the center of their
understanding of knowledge and information.  "#3">(3)

What then, does this mean for the
university library, the academic librarian? Is it the end of the
world, as we know it? Is the digital revolution likely to eliminate
the art, craft, and science of librarianship? Not likely, but it
certainly has and will continue to change it. Fortunately, it is
expensive to digitize the world. The rate of change previously
limited by bandwidth (the capacity for storing and manipulating
digital representations of knowledge) now faces the barriers raised
by the cost of converting the old touchable stuff into virtual

digital stuff. Politics and power also create their own
barriers.

The digital landscape belongs to no one
and everyone. Property rights to digital space hardly exist because
anyone can create new digital territory. I have a virtual server
located somewhere (I'm not sure exactly where). I own two domain
names, each one creating completely new digital space. It cost me
perhaps $50 to set this up, and I pay about $90 a month to maintain
this reasonably sized plot of digital real estate. This space not
only belongs exclusively to me, but it came without limiting anyone
else's ability to create more digital space. Since digital real
estate, unlike the limited physical land I grew up with, is close
to being a free good, it complicates the relationships of power and
authority, all of which depend on the management of
scarcity. (4)

Books and their publishers represent this
power and authority. We deliver books to the world within a system
that centralizes and controls the distribution of intellectual
content on behalf of various powerful groups. We like to think that
this is all done in the service of true and unfettered knowledge
but of course that is not so. All physical book and journal
publishing involves gatekeeper processes that enforce certain
standards of content and marketability on the production and
distribution of content. Many people and organizations live off
this gatekeeper function, the basis of which is the scarcity and
high cost of intellectual bandwidth. Paper, printing, binding,
distribution, and the rest of the physical process of information
production serve to limit the bandwidth for delivering content.
Librarians also limit the content available to their clients under
the name of collection development (another gatekeeper function)
selecting the physically available subset of information accessible
to their publics. Much effort, expense, and rationalization goes
into this rationing process

The digital imperative changes the
structures of cost and power that underlie these transactions. The

cost of producing a book on the Internet is close to zero (leaving
aside the cost of generating the intellectual content). I put two
books on line, both of them out-of-print, both previously produced
at considerable expense by reputable houses, sold to tiny
audiences, and surely resulted in significant financial loses to
the publishers. I put them on line for free, with the exception of
the sweat equity of my own work, a minimal investment compared to
what it would have taken me to produce these books in physical
form. They now live on my digital real estate, they cost me very
little to maintain there, and they remain available to anyone at
any time for no cost. I am my own gatekeeper.  "#5">(5)

It is the physicality of the information
medium that made possible the rationing, gate keeping, and in the
case of for-profit scientific journals, profit gouging that are key
characteristics of the paper-based information age. With the
dramatic decline in the cost of bandwidth (disk drives, internet
access, personal computers, and other forms of digital transmission
and storage), the threat to the monopoly of physical media grows
exponentially. We only need to look at MP3, Napster, and their
offspring to recognize the collapse of old rationing paradigms with
their attendant power and authority systems.  "#6">(6)

So where, in this wonderful new world, is
the library? We do not know for sure. Many smart people work
overtime to translate traditional library strengths into digital
age essential resources. We see the mega catalog movement in search
of the virtual union catalog. These efforts take the core finding
aid of the library and attempt to construct a monster computer
searchable file that will contain records for all the media
recorded in all the library catalogs of the known universe. Well, I
exaggerate slightly, but not by much. Like most such visions, the
critical challenges come from the most mundane of human foibles:
territoriality and resistance to common standards. Librarians have

many standards, but the wonderful human need to make common things
our own causes each library or librarian to modify or use the
standard in slightly different ways. These differences, not easily
reconciled, create a significant challenge to the implementation of
the megavision. (7)

Another effort seeks to digitize unique
subsets of the physical assets of libraries or groups of libraries.
Rare books, photographs, manuscripts, and similar special
collections yield to digitization and publication within the
infinitely expanding space of the Internet. These projects leverage
the unique physical assets of individual libraries into unique
digital assets, thereby preserving the identity and presence of the
institution in knowledge space.  "#8">(8)

Others, observing the rise of the portal
boom, seek to transform the library into an information utility for
a specific set of customers, usually faculty, students, and staff
of the academic institution. With exactly the same purpose as Yahoo
and the Microsoft Network, the library portals create a central
location where patrons begin their search for the information that
their lives require. Successful library portals must compete not
only against the commercial portal sites but also against other
portals within their own institution for athletic programs, alumni
associations, or the university's own homepage.  "#9">(9)

Then we have the dynamic and competitive
business of electronic library catalogs. I have looked through the
sites of many of these companies. They all promise to serve us
better, solve our technological problems, and adapt to any changes
in the electronic universe. They promise low costs, user
friendliness, and the ability to do everything and anything you
might want with the catalog resources of your library, and they
announce the capacity to link your systems seamlessly to everything
on the net. (10)

How then does a library, in real time and
with real money and serving real people, deal with infinite
possibilities of the digital age?  "#11">(11)

The digital world has forced us to think
somewhat differently about the value of the library. Once we valued
the library for the duplication it could sustain, as represented in
the annual ranking of library volumes and acquisition expenditures.
These data points, told me that the book I wanted that I knew to be
in the University of Illinois library was likely to also be in the
Bancroft Library. It told me that most of what I had used as a
graduate student in New York, I could probably find in the UCLA
library. Physical duplication of common titles proved to be the
touchstone of library quality. Indeed, I can still remember the
impressive repetition of the major university library acronyms in
the entries of the National Union Catalog. Those eight or ten
libraries whose initials always appeared under every citation were
surely the best for they duplicated the most.

In a digital world, no one cares who has
the copy we find on line. The existence of duplicate copies gives
no one an advantage when the digital copy is infinitely
reproducible. If I find the journal article in JHU's Project Muse,
I do not care if it also exists in my home library or if it exists
in Berkeley's library. I have it if Project Muse has it. I only
need the library to facilitate my access to this digital
resource.

The key to this shift in emphasis of
course is the recognition that physical copies of expensive but
common artifacts have little value if a digital version exists. The
trick is to find the digital version, and to find all those that
are like it, or related to it, or suggestive of
it.

Who among us has not used Google or Yahoo or Altavista? For us old people, these
services are a miracle and a threat. Where are the subject
headings? Where is the authority that classifies this as Latin
American history and that as Latin American literature? I search
for Bolívar, and I get endless amounts of stuff. Some junk,
some interesting, some unanticipated. I browse around, I find
serendipitously wonderful things about Don Simón, but when I
am done, I do not know if I am done. What did the search miss? What
did I skip over in skimming through the endless Bolivarian items,
most of which have nothing to do with the historical Bolívar
of my work? The Internet search engine is a miracle, but it also
finds more junk than stuff. I go to Project Muse, I search there
and get a big list of articles, some relevant, some not, but again,
unstructured, free form text. I love it; I worry about
it.

Librarians should be in this game in a
big way, and many are. As the Internet becomes so large an
information space that it requires systematic and authoritative
management, the librarian's skills, properly translated, will
become crucial for ensuring me that I do indeed have all that I
should on Bolívar. The ownership of the physical space or
the artifacts matters much less than the ability to find the right
digitally stored knowledge. I do not care where Bolívar's Carta de Jamaica is stored; I care that I can read the
authoritative annotated text on line.  "#12">(12)

Will all this become free? No; money will
change hands, and probably more money than we now spend on
libraries, but we will spend the money differently. We will spend
it on hardware, software, and the gurus who manage them. We will
spend it on translating content into digital form; we will spend it
on search engines and the research that builds them. The
construction of these tools, currently in the earliest stages, will

require us to waste much money. We will build the tools,
anticipating one kind of bandwidth and capacity and as soon as our
tools appear, the bandwidth will expand to such an extent that we
will need to begin again.

Libraries and librarians will do two
things most. They will maintain and manage unique collections of
objects (sheet music from Hoagy Carmichael or the Letters of Thomas
Jefferson), many of which they will digitize and deliver into the
world. They will provide their constituents with help and
assistance, as they always have, in finding, evaluating, and
understanding the universe of information that the digital world
has provided us. They will spend less time and energy developing
collections and much more developing on-line guides to subjects,
topics, and resources. They will buy fewer materials. No one will
care what volume of material each library owns, only what volume of
materials each library's clients can access.  "#13">(13)

Can we predict this development, its pace
and content? Probably not. But let me offer you Lombardi's Rules
for Digital Survival created from 30 years of engagement in the
academic computer revolution.

1. The objects are not as important as the
   content. Collection development becomes access development. Access
   to content is the primary mantra of all library work. Geography
   becomes increasingly irrelevant.

2. Helping clients find resources in a
   digitally chaotic world is the first priority. Digitizing the rare
   book collection might be the second.

3. If a vendor promises you seamless access
   and modular compatibility with any future developments, expect
   expensive upgrades.

4. If others spend money on a similar
   project, let them finish before you start yours. Being first to
   invent large scale digital library projects is for those with money
   to lose, tolerant customers, and tenure. If it will take ten years
   to deliver value, let someone else invest in it.

5. If someone else has a service you need,
   buy it, do not invent it. If someone has 80% of the service you
   need, buy it; do not invent it.

6. Nothing currently defining the Internet
   will remain recognizable after 5 years.

7. There is safety in numbers; join
   consortia and urge others to take the lead.

8. Invest in unique products only when you
   have a comparative advantage and someone else pays for it.

9. For the next ten years, if it works well,
   is reliable, and you know how to use it, it is
   obsolete.

John V. Lombardi
July 1, 2000
TheCenter
University of Florida

"mailto:lombardi@jvlone.com">lombardi@jvlone.com
"http://jvlone.com/">http://jvlone.com

Notes

1. Even the New York Times follows the inclinations of
   students and wonders about the future of the academic library. Lisa
   Guernsey. "The Library As the Latest Web Venture." The New York
   Times (June 15, 2000) and Carol A. Wright outlines the
   relationships of the electronic media to the standard General
   Education program in Carol A. Wright. "Information Literacy within
   the General Education Program: Implications for Distance Education
   ," The Journal of General Education (49.1, 2000) 23-33.
   [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_general_education/v049/49.1wrigh...
2. Bonnie A. Nardi, Steve Whittaker, and Heinrich Schwarz. "It's
   Not What You Know, It's Who You Know-Work in the Information Age." First Monday (5:5 May 1, 2000)
   [http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_5/nardi/index.html] offer
   an ethnographic perspective on how people interact and construct
   their personal and professional networks in an information age with
   a number of interesting examples. On a more focused scale see the

   essay on teaching medicine in cyberspace in Kathleen W. Jones and
   Russell C. Maulitz. "Teaching the History of Medicine in
   Cyberspace. NetNotes: Medical History on the Internet," Bulletin
   of the History of Medicine (72:4, 1998) 734-743.
   [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bulletin_of_the_history_of_medicine/
   v072/72.4jones.html]

3. Naturally, visionaries spin versions of our digital futures,
   some seeing nirvana in our future and others finding catastrophe.
   An interesting perspective on this futurology comes from the
   chapters of The Social Life of Information by John Seely
   Brown and Paul Duguid, published in March 2000 by Harvard Business
   School Press with excerpts reprinted in First Monday (5: 4,
   April 3, 2000)
   [http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_4/brown_contents.html]
4. For a helpful perspective on the World Wide Web see Bill Hilf.
   "Media Lullabies: The Reinvention of the World Wide Web." First
   Monday (3:4 April 6. 1998).
   [http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_4/hilf/index.html].
5. Michael Jensen's opinion piece in The Chronicle of Higher
   Education (June 23, 2000) explores the impact of e-publishing
   on traditional publishers in his "E-Books and Retro Glue Protect
   the Vested Interests of Publishing." Even so elite a journal as The New Yorker entered the fray in its combined issues of
   6/19 and 6/26/2000 with James Surowiecki's "The Financial Page:
   Books Will Endure, But Will Publishers?" The Wall Street Journal
   also follows the commercial issues of publishers vs. the Internet
   as in the recent articles by Tom Weber, "Will E-Publishers Reshape
   or Flood the Book Market?" Wall Street Journal, July 3,
   2000, and Erin White, "Book Publishers Aim to Get Ahead Of the
   Electronic-Piracy Game," Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2000
   [both available on-line for subscribers to WSJ service at
   [http://www.wsj.com]. In typical Internet speed, the on-demand book
   has gone international.  For a Venezuelan example see the
   website for EdiciónXDemanda at
   [http://www.comala.com/edicionxdemanda.asp]. For an excellent
   example of the Internet hypertext-multimedia book, published via Post-Modern Culture (itself an all electronic journal) see
   Peter S. Donaldson, "Digital Archives and Sibylline Fragments: The Tempest and the End of Books," Post Modern
   Culture (8:2, 1998)
   [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v008/8.2donaldson.html] which
   leads to the full text of: Peter S. Donaldson,. Digital Archives
   and Sibylline Fragments:
   The Tempest and the End of Books, Post Modern Culture
   (1998)
   [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v008/donaldson/index.htm].
6. Richard K. Johnson addresses the efforts he expects the
   for-profit journal publishers to employ in their response to the
   internet and urges librarians to band together to resist continued
   price gouging: "A Question of Access: SPARC, BioOne, and
   Society-Driven Electronic Publishing," D-Lib Magazine (6:5,
   May 2000) [http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may00/johnson/05johnson.html].
   Peter B. Boyce provides his own perspective on the electronic
   journal in the field of astronomy in "What Does the Future Hold?
   Ask an Astronomer" (presented at NC Serials Conference,
   Chapel Hill, March 16, 2000)
   [http://www.aas.org/~pboyce/epubs/NCSerials2000/NC2000.html]. And
   Eyal Amiran offers an essay on the future of the serial in an
   electronic world which addresses both the philosophical notion that
   underlies serialization and the issues of power and politics
   associated with journals in his "Electronic Time and the Serials
   Revolution," The Yale Journal of Criticism (10:2, 1997)
   445-454
   [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/yale_journal_of_criticism/v010/10.2amiran.h...
7. Karen Coyle discusses the challenges of mega library programs
   in her description of "The Virtual Union Catalog: A Comparative
   Study," D-Lib Magazine (6:3, March 2000)
   [http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march00/coyle/03coyle.html]. David
   Bearmank and colleagues review another major effort in "A Common
   Model to Support Interoperable Metadata: Progress Report on
   Reconciling Metadata Requirements from The Dublin Core and
   INDECS/DOI Communities," D-Lib Magazine (5:1, January 1999)

   [http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january99/bearman/01bearman.html]. They
   capture the all encompassing model for this project by recognizing
   that their standard data definition needs to match this underlying
   commerce model: "People Make Stuff, People Use Stuff, and People Do
   Deals About Stuff." Steve Coffman takes a different perspective in
   proposing that all the public libraries at least convert themselves
   into a variant of Amazon.com in his piece on "Building Earth's
   Largest Library: Driving into the Future." SeacheR (7:3,
   March 1999) [http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/mar99/coffman.htm].
   Proving that whatever you can imagine will become a product on the
   Internet, ebrary.com has a web site and business model
   designed to accomplish pretty much what Coffman suggests.
   [http://www.ebrary.com]. Standards are at the core of the
   librarians' sense of professional standing as is visible in the
   documents on "Standards for College Libraries, 2000 Edition" and
   the "Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher
   Education," both items produced by the Association of College
   and Research Libraries Standards Committee and available at:
   [http://www.ala.org/acrl/ilcomstan.html] and
   [http://www.ala.org/acrl/resdec99.html] respectively.

8. The Library of Congress American Memory project is a
   good example at {http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/amhome.html] as are
   the Thomas Jefferson Online Resources at the University of
   Virginia available at
   [http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/jefferson/].  Also of interest
   is the tightly focused translation to the web of a classic late
   19th-century medical reference work (Index-Catalogue of the
   Library of the Surgeon-General's Office of the United States
   Army) described in Russell C. Maulitz, "Billings in
   Cyberspace: Toward the Electronic Index-Catalogue," Netnotes: Medical History on the Internet, Bulletin of the
   History of Medicine (71:4, 1997) 689-692
   [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bulletin_of_the_history_of_medicine/
   v071/71.4maulitz.html]
9. Suzanne Cohen and colleagues present the Cornell University
   version of this movement in "MyLibrary: Personalized Electronic
   Services in the Cornell University Library," D-Lib Magazine (6:4 April 2000)
   [http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april00/mistlebauer/04mistlebauer.html].
   For another version, see the site at MyLibrary@NCState at
   [http://my.lib.ncsu.edu/]. For an excellent example of an athletic
   portal see the Stanford sports portal at
   [http://gostanford.fansonly.com/]. An alumni portal for the
   University of Florida that represents a shell system applicable to
   many universities with similar functions appears at
   [http://zgators.myway.com/features/home/default.asp]
10. An example from Innovative Interfaces Millennium system
    reads:
    "Innovative Interfaces partners with libraries worldwide to
    provide Web-based information technology solutions to both patrons
    and staff.
    Innovative's Millennium system is a Web-based,
    open-platform system that offers the best and most comprehensive
    functionality of any library automation software. Its Java
    interface offers staff and patrons an intuitive, easy-to-use, and
    platform-independent system. With its multi-tiered system
    architecture, object-oriented design, and complete scalability,
    Millennium provides full, integrated functionality; its core
    modules constitute a time- and library-tested automation system
    that can be implemented in every type of library.
    Innovative prides itself on its adaptation to and adoption of new
    technologies; it offers libraries industry-standard software
    solutions that are platform-independent, Web-based, and intuitive,
    as well as outstanding, industry-leading services and support.
    Millennium includes modules unequalled for quality, value,
    functionality, and ease of use.
    Innovative offers a full suite of Millennium modules designed for
    a variety of functions that can be implemented in every sort of
    library." [http://www.iii.com/products/]
11. David M. Levy's "Digital Libraries and the Problem of Purpose," D-Lib Magazine (6:1 January 2000) engages this question with
    some cautionary comments about the myth of the all-digital universe
    [http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january00/01levy.html].
12. Laura Zick offers a compelling view of librarians and
    intelligent software collaborating to serve patrons in "The Work of
    Information Mediators: A Comparison of Librarians and Intelligent
    Software Agents," First Monday, (5:5 May 2000)
    [http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_5/zick/index.html].  For
    an example of a collaboration that produces an guide to new
    materials appearing on line see The Scout Report [http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/]. This review appears not only on the
    net but also in various specialized email editions sent to
    subscribers for free. Their intro blurb highlights the librarian's
    role: "Surf smarter, not longer. Let the Internet Scout Project
    show you the way to the best resources on the Internet--then you
    can choose what's best for you. Librarians and educators do
    the filtering for you, reading hundreds of announcements each week
    looking for the online resources most valuable to the education
    community.{emphasis added}."
13. The challenge of putting special collections on line is clear
    in Michael L.W. Jones, Geri K. Gay, Robert H. Rieger's "Project
    Soup: Comparing Evaluations of Digital Collection Efforts," D-Lib Magazine (5:11 November 1999)
    [http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november99/11jones.html]. Indiana
    University's Hoagy Carmichael Collection is at
    [http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/hoagy/]. Michelle Mach and
    Cynthia D. Shirkey illustrate the librarian's commitment to provide
    guides to a specific category of texts in "Twentieth-century
    authors: Biographic and bibliographic information is just a click
    away," College & Research Libraries News, Internet
    Resources, (ALA) December 1999
    [http://www.ala.org/acrl/resdec99.html].
    No project succeeds without engaging the challenge of intellectual
    property, and Lynn Pritcher describes how one specialized project
    dealt with these issues in "Ad*Access: Seeking Copyright
    Permissions for a Digital Age," D-Lib Magazine (6:2 February
    2000)

    [http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/pritcher/02pritcher.html].
    Francie C. Davis and Joyce Renfroe Gotsch get specific on how to
    organize for service in the electronic age within the context of a
    small college library in "Disprove Old Library Perceptions Through
    Technology Training. Marketing Library Services. A "How-To"
    Marketing Tool Written Specifically for Librarians!" InfoToday (12:4 June 1998)
    [http://www.infotoday.com/mls/jun98/howto.htm].