Introduction

One would have no great difficulty in estimating the demand function, i.e., the relationship between the price and the quantity that can be sold at that price for, say, tomatoes. But one would have considerable problems in making sales predictions at various hypothetical alternative prices for a new product that looks like a blue tomato and tastes like a peach. (Quandt 1996, 20)

This vivid image of an odd-looking vegetable that tastes like a fruit is meant to highlight the difficulty of estimating the demand side in the overall cost picture of producing and distributing new products, such as electronic publications. Compared to the traditional printed material, electronic products are new, from their internal architecture to the mechanisms of production, distribution, and access that stem from it. After all, the world of readers is not a homogeneous social group, a market with a simple set of specific needs. Yet we assume that a segment of this market-the scholarly community-takes easily and more or less quickly to supplementing their long established habits (of associating the printed text with a paper object) with different habits, experienced as equally convenient, of searching for and reading electronic texts. While this observation may be correct, it should be emphasized at this point that precisely in the expression "more or less" is where the opportunity lies-for those of us interested in transitions-to see what is involved in this change of habit and why it is not just a "matter of time." As anyone who has tried to explain the possibilities of electronic text delivery to an educated friend will attest, the idea can be viewed with anxiety and taken to mean the end of the book. The Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic, a wellknown author and dissident, looked at me with surprise as I tried to explain the need for library automation (and therefore for his ministerial support): he held both hands clasped together as if in prayer and then opened them up like a book

close to his face. He took a deep breath, exhaled, and explained how much the scent of books meant to him. His jump from on-line cataloging and microfilm preservation to the demise of his personal library was a rather daring leap of the imagination but not an uncommon one, even among those who should know better. It is not just the community of scholars, then, but of politicians and even librarians who must change their attitudes and habits. The problem is further compounded if we consider that in the case of Eastern Europe this new product is being introduced into a setting where the very notion of a market is itself unsettled. The question of demand is quite different in a society that had been dominated by a political economy of command.

In the pages that follow I will give a brief account of an extensive interlibrary automation and networking project that The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation initiated and funded abroad, in the Czech and Slovak republics.^[1] While most of the papers in this volume deal with digital libraries, this one points to the complexities that affect the ability of any library to change its ways and expand its mandate to include access to digitized materials. My aim is critical rather than comprehensive. By telling the reader about some of the obstacles that were confronted along the way, I hope to draw attention to the kinds of issues that need to be kept in mind when we think of establishing library consortia-the seemingly natural setting for the new technologies-in other countries.