The Context for the Future

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the factors that libraries will have to address over the next few years, as they make further advances toward the goal of access to an array of information resources from scholars' desktops. Emerging standards for representing the structure of documents will support the coherent development of services to deliver the full text of works online. Communication standards for remote information retrieval will promote convenient access for end users to distant information resources over national computer networks. How quickly the technological potential is exploited for the benefit of scholarship will depend on some non-technological factors. One is the general need to modify procedures and organizations to manage the new technology. The traditional publishing industry has found that the technical problems involved in adopting new technology for preparing, editing, composing, and printing books are relatively simple to solve, given enough financial resources; developing new management structures and integrating them into the existing organization represent the real challenge.