If We Build It

This book, first published in 1993, addresses important questions about the future that libraries need to answer today such as: What will change for serials librarians, vendors, and publishers as ink and paper become the oddity and electronic transmitters and receivers become the norm? What services will be in demand and who will provide them? Which economic models will keep them afloat? Most importantly, can the disparate groups currently active in scholarly communication work together to build the physical, social, and economic backbone of a new model?

This book is an invaluable guide to the future of serials librarianship. It describes new technologies, predicts how the publishing industry will develop in the near future, and explores how the library may evolve within a new system of scholarly communication. Just a few of the exciting topics covered include the development of standards for networking technologies; the shift from ownership to access in libraries as a result of electronic information; the history of scholarly communication; copyright of electronic data; higher education in the 1990s; and marketing in libraries.