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A number of distinct types of “electronic library” now exist. The term has shed the vagueness with which it has been used in the past. Moreover, certain forms of electronic library service will prove more effective and durable than others. The most successful form of electronic library will reproduce the functionality of the traditional library, but must also fully exploit the unique features of electronic information provision.

Previous revolutions, the Agrarian and Industrial, are examined and their features compared with the Information Revolution. Lessons are drawn from the comparison and a range of global issues identified. The nature of the Internet is considered and its pretensions argued to be inflated. The role of the state in developing an information society is discussed. A national information policy is identified as a feature and its application in and implications for Scotland are considered. Key features of an Internet culture are indicated and discussed, with lessons and conclusions for social development within the information society presented.

Progress towards achieving the concepts of Universal Bibliographic Control and Universal Access to Publications is outlined in relation to printed publications and discussed in the context of electronic information. The unique problems relating to consistent identification of electronic materials are indicated and various metadata projects for recording and searching electronic files are outlined. The problems of access to electronic materials are discussed and various relevant international projects considered.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons why CD‐ROM technology has made such a widespread impact on libraries in the science, technology and medicine (STM) sectors, and whether, now and in the future, there are sensible alternative strategies which our profession should consider adopting. It will concentrate mostly on large, core bibliographic databases both because this area of the market represents the great volume of sales by value — and because it is the area I know best.

Three years ago, Derek Law and I wrote a conference paper in which we questioned what we saw as our profession's uncritical embracing of CD‐ROM technology. In its published form it stirred up a wasps' nest of comment which included a marketing first in Charles Chadwyck‐Healey's pioneering of the footnote as an advertising medium. The danger of dabbling publicly in futurology is that the written word is normally more permanent than the ideas it conveys, and that those who thought you were daft at the time can normally manage to put their hands to a few damaging phrases.

The Glasgow Digital Library (GDL) Project has a significance over and above its primary aim of creating a joint digital library for the citizens of Glasgow. It is also both an important building block in the development of a planned and co‐ordinated “virtual Scotland” and a rich environment for research into issues relevant to that enterprise. Its creation comes at a time of political, social, economic and cultural change in Scotland, and may be seen, at least in part, as a response to a developing Scottish focus in these areas, a key element of which is a new socially inclusive and digitally driven educational vision and strategy based on the Scottish traditions of meritocratic education, sharing and common enterprise, and a fiercely independent approach. The initiative is based at the Centre for Digital Library Research at Strathclyde University alongside a range of other projects of relevance both to the development of a coherent virtual landscape in Scotland and to the GDL itself, a supportive environment which allows it to draw upon the research results and staff expertise of other relevant projects for use in its own development and enables its relationship to virtual Scotland to be both explored and developed more readily. Although its primary aim is the creation of content (based initially on electronic resources created by the institutions, on public domain information, and on joint purchases and digitisation initiatives) the project will also investigate relationships between regional and national collaborative collection management programmes with SCONE (Scottish Collections Network Extension project) and relationships between regional and national distributed union catalogues with CAIRNS (Co‐operative Academic Information Retrieval Network for Scotland) and COSMIC (Confederation of Scottish Mini‐Clumps). It will also have to tackle issues associated with the management of co‐operation.

Tony McSean was editor of VINEs 19 to 34, December 1977 to July 1980, a time when there was Lots Happening — in one year he produced six issues. He continues to make regular contributions to the professional literature and will be remembered by many for an article with fellow conspirator Derek Law in November 1990's Library Association Record which dared to suggest that CD‐ROM had no long term future. Heresy at the time when we couldn't get enough of them and Internet cafes were but a gleam in a few entrepreneurial eyes. His career since leaving VINE and the University of Southampton has taken him to Geac where he installed many of the early GLIS systems, to The British Library as Head of Marketing and Support of the Bibliographic Services Division, and most recently to the BMA Library, whose automation experiences he recounts here.

The adaptability of the theory of integrative levels to a generalised classification scheme is questioned in that its hypotheses have not been adequately developed and confirmed. Application to the humanistic disciplines seems particularly inappropriate. Relationships between nineteenth century philosophical systems are traced and the Classification Research Group's dependence upon James Duff Brown's classification scheme is emphasized. It is suggested that not enough cognisance has been taken of twentieth century relativistic thinking in which space‐time is treated as a continuum.

This paper traces the development of JISC strategy for, and provision of, networked information services through the 1990s. The account has been structured in “eras”, and although each lasted only a few years it was arguably equivalent to a long period of history in such a fast moving field. The early era of the Computer Board and the Information Systems Committee (precursors of JISC) was characterised by experimentation, risk‐taking, and learning by doing. With the establishment of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) in 1993 we entered a second era, of consolidation of policy, expansion of service provision through new datasets and databases, and increasing take‐up by users. The third era benefited from the wider context set by the Follett Report and, from 1995, saw a flowering of related projects and developments creating the “electronic library”. JISC’s new five‐year strategy launched late in 1996 heralded a fourth era, to be led by the Committee for Electronic Information (CEI) which has now set about widening the scope of nationally provided electronic collections even further, and has begun to tackle a wide range of management and policy issues relating to a much more mature range of services. The paper concludes with some consideration of the issues to be faced in the next phase of provision.