URN_NBN_SI_DOC-HDQDVENJ

UNIVERSAL AVAILA BILITY OF PUBLICATIONS IN AN ELECTRONIC AGE Maurice B. Line I FLA UAP Programme, British Library, Boston Spa, UK Electronic technology is affecting the availability of publications in a number of important and possibly radical ways. Access to union and other catalogues online is making it easier to locate items, and telefacsimile is being used more and more to transmit them. Interlending and document supply are becoming more independent of national boundaries. Authors with desk top publishing systems can now publish material themselves, though this raises the prospect of a mass of unrefereed material to which bibliographical control is inadequate. Text input by authors can also be accessed online through bulletin boards. Publishers are making the full text of some material (mainly reference works and journal articles) available electronically, but data on the use made of this is hard to obtain. CD ROMs of full text can be used in various ways: articles can be printed on demand by centres such as the British Library (as in the ADONIS experiment), or they can be transmitted direct to users, or discs can be leased or sold to libraries, thereby greatly increasing their holdings. Economic, software, hardware and usage problems arise with all of these possibilities, and the next few years are likely to be ones of experiment, which will probably involve WORMs and other forms of digital optical storage. Knjižnica. Tematska št. IA T U L 1989 21