Introduction

There are several future trends that everyone seems to agree upon. They include

• widespread availability of computers for all college and university students and faculty

• general substitution of electronic for paper information

• library purchase of access to scholarly publications rather than physical copies of them

Early steps in these directions have been followed by many libraries. Much of this movement has taken the form of digitization. Unfortunately some of the digitized material is not used as much as we would like. This lack of interest may reflect the choice of the material to convert; realistically, nineteenth-century books that have never been reprinted or microfilmed may have been obscure for good reasons and will not be used much in the future. But some more general problems with the style of much electronic library material suggest that the difficulties may be more pervasive.