Program Introduction
Ward Shaw, Program Coordinator

With all due respect to the caveats, cautionary tales, and legal, fiscal, and emotional issues, it neverthless is clear that within a foreseeable time the vast majority of the materials scholars and students need to do their research and further their educations will be available online, electronically, on the Internet.

This cannot help but have profund implications for the organizations we have constructed in a different era to facilitate the delivery and use of scholarly information. There are very substantial resources being applied to that facilitation right now, by publishers both primary and "secondary", academic insititutions, societies, libraries, and others. These resources necessarily will be redirected, either by their managers or the markets and organizations they serve.

The central issue of this conference is:

How should we proactively redirect our resources so that we can continue to provide crucial value to the research and education enterprise and process?

Related questions include:

What should libraries collect, if anything?

What secondary services will add value and attract support, commercially or otherwise?

Who will provide those services?

Where will we find the required skills?

Who will preserve and enhance the certification & dissemination processes given the growth of institutional repositories, e-print archives, open access journals, secondary services and the like?