o Discussion by E-mail with other librarians, conference reports and announcements, and so on.
It is true, as one librarian said to me, that you can tell that librarians didn't set up the Internet. The archives grew piecemeal and their contents are far from uniform in quality. In addition, the whole Internet is so vast it probably can't be catalogued. Nevertheless, rough and ready tools and customs have grown up to provide some sort of access to the information that is "out there". There is a great deal of work to be done by librarians that will doubtless keep them employed into the next millenium.
The main boon to librarians is the hierarchical organization of the net into nodes, directories, and subdirectories. These provide an implicit and universal call number to *everything in the electronic world*. The day is not far away when a cross-reference like
See ota.ox.ac.uk:/pub/HistoricalDocs/Political/US/constitution
will be as common as a bibliographic citation or See reference in a card catalogue.
The Internet also carries a number of hidden expenses and dangers to libraries:
o It will somewhat increase the expense of computer equipment,
technical personnel, software, etc. needed by libraries
o Additional phone lines may become necessary, especially if some
sort of public access to the Internet is contemplated
o Staff training needs will be greater
o The local computer system will need virus protection software and regular backups (a good idea anyway but seldom practiced by librarians, in my experience. Persons who are trained in book conservation should know better!).