The E-library strategy projected in this plan is a visionary one that can enable major changes and improvements in academic, public, and special library service. This vision is, though, one that can be realized with today's technology. At the same time, it will challenge the political and social structure within which libraries operate: in academic libraries, the traditional emphasis on local collections, extending to accreditation issues; in public libraries, the potential of electronic branch and central libraries fully available to the public; and for special libraries, new opportunities for shared collections and networks.

The environment in which this strategic plan has been developed is, at the moment, dominated by a sense of library limits. The continued expansion and rapid growth of local academic library collections is now clearly at an end. Corporate libraries, and even law libraries, are faced with operating within a difficult economic climate, as well as with very active competition from commercial information sources. For example, public libraries may be seen as a desirable but not critical municipal service in a time when the budgets of safety and health agencies are being cut back.

Further, libraries in general have a very high labor-to-cost ratio in their budgets, and labor costs are still increasing, notwithstanding automation investments. It is difficult for libraries to obtain capital, startup, or seed funding for innovative activities, and those technology-intensive initiatives that offer the potential of decreased labor costs can provoke the opposition of library staff.

However, libraries have achieved some considerable successes in the past two decades by improving both their service and their credibility within their organizations—and these positive changes have been accomplished mostly with judicious use of information technologies. The advances in computing and information technology have been well-chronicled: the continuing precipitous drop in computing costs, the growth of the Internet and private networks, and the explosive increase in publicly available information databases.

For example, OCLC has become one of the largest computer network organizations in the world by creating a cooperative cataloging network of more than 6,000 libraries worldwide. On-line public access catalogs now serve millions of users on more than 50,000 dedicated terminals in the United States alone. The University of California MELVYL on-line catalog system has now expanded into an index database reference service and supports more than six million searches a year. And, libraries have become the largest group of customers of CD-ROM publishing technology; more than 30,000 optical media publications such as those offered by InfoTrac and Silver Platter are subscribed to by U.S. libraries.

This march of technology continues and in the next decade will result in further innovations that are extremely difficult to predict. What is clear is that libraries can now go beyond automation of their order files and catalogs to automation of their collections themselves—and it is possible to circumvent the fiscal limitations that appear to obtain today.

This Electronic Library Strategic Plan recommends a paradigm shift in library service, and demonstrates the steps necessary to provide improved library services with limited capacities and operating investments.

SESSION IV-A

Anne KENNEY

The Cornell/Xerox Joint Study in Digital Preservation resulted in the recording of 1,000 brittle books as 600-dpi digital images and the production, on demand, of high-quality and archivally sound paper replacements. The project, which was supported by the Commission on Preservation and Access, also investigated some of the issues surrounding scanning, storing, retrieving, and providing access to digital images in a network environment.