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Technological advances have resulted in the exponential growth of online services over the past few years and are predicted to provide ever‐increasing capabilities. However, social, economic and political factors will also influence the direction, extent and impact of such developments. Wise planners should consider the potential effects of both technological and non‐technological factors when major decisions must be made regarding information‐related commitments of time, effort and financial resources. This paper uses the example of bibliographic retrieval services to explore potential impacts upon areas of concern to the user of online services. Four types of influencing factors are addressed: the momentum already evident in historic usage trends; technological advances; actions/policies intended to enhance or control evolving services; and other social, economic and political developments which will affect future online capabilities.

On‐Line Review is sponsoring this important meeting, which will be held at the Tara Hotel, Kensington, London, from the 13th to the 15th December 1977.

Tuesday 13th December 1977 was a cold, damp day in London, but the staff of the registration desk at the Tara Hotel soon got warmed up as over 400 delegates from twenty‐four countries arrived to collect their preprints volumes and attendance lists.

The present success of online retrieval is well known. The future is dependent on several factors including technological developments (computers, communications, terminals and storage), progress in information with science research, availability and use of funds for employing and coupling the available technology and the useful results of research, and finally the nontechnical exterior factors, such as political, psychological, legal and legislative constraints. Research is under way to pave the way for the development of transparent systems for retrieving references, facts and information contained in textual material. Such systems will greatly increase the useability of computer‐readable databases by professionals and laymen alike. Really significant changes will depend on research that progresses towards fact retrieval and ultimately towards knowledge retrieval.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

If an oracle could predict the next forty years with perfect accuracy, what would you do with the information? As the pace of change in the business environment continues to accelerate, confidence in our ability to forecast the future in which we will be operating seems to have gone the way of the fintailed cars and poodle skirts of the '50s.

This article aims to provide examples of opportunities to implement disruptive innovation and offer a framework to introduce it in the public sector – proposing a way to use innovation to make public programs radically cheaper without slashing services.

By focusing on the public sector job to be done – promoting public safety through incarceration vs electronic monitoring – can illuminate how to accomplish the core goals of an existing process in a different way.

The paper finds that the best place to start disruptive innovation tends to be in a market segment that is vastly over‐served or not served at all by the current, dominant model of delivery.

Government has an array of tools and channels that can be used to foster the growth of disruptive technologies.

From homeland security to education, from health care to defense, what is needed are innovations that break traditional trade‐offs, particularly that between price and performance. Disruptive innovation offers a proven path to accomplish this goal and in the process transform public services.

This paper considers how knowledge has been organized about museum objects and belongings at the Museum of Anthropology, in what is now known as British Columbia, and proposes the concept of historical or provenance warrant to understand how cataloguing decisions were made and are limited by current museum systems.

Through interviews and archival research, we trace how cataloguing was done at the museum through time and some of the challenges imposed by historical documentation systems.

Reading from the first attempts at standardizing object nomenclatures in the journals of private collectors to the contemporary practices associated with object documentation in the digital age, we posit that historic or provenance warrant is crafted through donor attribution or association, object naming, the concept of geo-cultural location and the imposition of unique identifiers, numbers and direct labels that physically mark belongings.

The ultimate goal and contribution of this research is to understand and describe the systems that structure and organize knowledge, in an effort to repair the history and terminologies moving forward.