Emerging Issues in the Electronic Environment: Challenges for Librarians and Searchers in the Sciences (review)

Articles about student support services provide practical approaches to the services that are important to distant learners: electronic books, electronic reserves, document delivery, instruction, and virtual reference or chat. Naturally, these same articles describe how technologies (especially CD-ROM, Web, multimedia, and videoconferencing) are used to provide services and to raise awareness of their availability. For example, Tina Adams talks about educating educators to the importance of library services and resources for their distance learning students. This is a very useful publication for anyone interested in innovative solutions to current problems in distance learning library services. The contributors’ index provides a list of active researchers for others who may be seeking research partners. The index provides a list of topics and the institutions where the research was undertaken. The exclusion of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s keynote address, “Copyright as an Instrument of Censorship,” is regretted. It would have been a valuable addition to the proceedings because of widespread interest in copyright issues across the academy. An excellent complement for locating related current and historical research is Alexander L. Slade’s standard work, Library Services for Distance Learning: The Fourth Bibliography, http:// uviclib.uvic.ca/dls/bibliography4.html.