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The introduction of the CD‐ROM medium into British academic library services was well received by both librarians and their clientele. Expenditure on this resource continues to grow and about half the databases obtained in this medium are now available through campus networks. The advantages of alternative forms of delivery — particularly those utilizing wide‐area networking — may, however, offer a challenge to this mode of delivery.

The growth of UK produced online databases is explored with particular reference to activities in and the problems of marketing in the non‐profit sector.

A year‐long study of free end‐user access to the Medline database (using the Grateful Med software) was undertaken in 1993. Twenty bio‐scientists from two UK universities were surveyed at the beginning and end of the year. Responses were viewed in the light of independent factors affecting user attitude and behaviour, such as familiarity with information technology and a perceived need for bibliographic data. Those concerning quality of data or the capability of the software were relatively few and these were assigned less importance than practical considerations such as the location of the PC linking the user to Medline and the quality of network connections. Most users used Grateful Med in a simplistic way—not venturing beyond keyword searching—although deficiencies in coverage or recall were protected against by recourse to other end‐user systems. Librarian‐mediated online and CDROM services have been superseded—for this group of users—by desktop end‐user services.

Published statistics about the size of the market for online services are rarely presented with any provenance and are frequently full of errors. The statistics used in preparing this paper present a partial view, that of online supply services to the United Kingdom. From July 1987 to December 1988 the authors monitored the expenditure on online services of representative panels of users in universities, polytechnics and public libraries, chosen because it was felt that public‐funded bodies would be more amenable to supplying usage data than private sector organisations in industry and commerce. The authors intend, in future investigations, to include this larger, more high‐spending sector.

Following the recent paper by Palmer in Aslib Proceedings in which she discussed the changes taking place in agricultural information, this paper discusses the effect of recent government policy on personal advisory work. It seeks to demonstrate that state advisers and private consultants exhibit similar information‐related behaviour and share a relatively small clientele. Pressures of commercialisation on the public sector will increase competition which will be to the detriment of the public service as it will be unable to provide advice of the same intensity or quality as private consultants who can devote all of their time to their, relatively few, customers.

Changing access. The scene for the session was set by a paper presented by Harry East of the Centre for Communication and Information Studies (CCIS), University of Westminster, UK, which had been co‐authored with his colleague Yvette Tilson. This brought together material from the past five years of a continuing study about information access within the academic sector. The sampling panel comprised the same 15 academic institutions throughout the 1988–92 survey period.

The information presented in this paper is derived from a census conducted in March 1981, and published in 1983. Subjective observation of special libraries in the interim would suggest an overall retrenchment, particularly severe in smaller units. During the decade 1972–81, there appears to have been a net decrease in the number of special library and information service units, though probably a small growth overall in the number of staff in the special library sector, particularly those in qualified posts. Special librarians, as a group, tend to have less professional LIS qualifications than their counterparts in public and academic libraries, but are more likely to have a degree in another field. There has been a considerable growth in the number of staff with qualifications of all types in special libraries during the decade. Women constitute a majority of the staff in posts of all types in special libraries though less so than in academic and public libraries. Nevertheless, there has been a significant growth in the number and percentage of females occupying professional posts in special libraries during the decade, a trend which seems likely to continue, despite a much higher ‘wastage’ of females in the profession. Whereas female special librarians are more likely than males to have a formal LIS qualification, they are less likely to hold non‐LIS degrees. The bulk of ‘information science’ posts are in special libraries and the majority of these are in industry and commerce. Nearly 70% of all special library posts are in the south east of England—a situation that has not changed during the decade.

UK Higher Education has a well‐established network (JANET) accessible to its students and staff. Its existence made it possible for a trans‐university body (JISC) to sponsor the development of datacentres at various sites around the network. Through licensing agreements made with the owners of popular databases (typically marketed by commercial vendors), these databases are now accessible to the Higher Education community through JANET. Preserving the tradition of making print‐based media freely available in academia, there are no direct charges to endusers of electronic sources. There are, however, considerable charges (licensing fees) entailed for the community as a whole. JISC's policy has been that, while access is ‘free to the end‐user at the point of use’, an annual subscription is levied to each Higher Education site which provides access to these databases. In most cases this subscription is met from the budget of the institution's library and information services. The paper considers the impact of this centralised information provision on the growth of end‐user services and some limitations of the current charging policies.

Dear Sir, The review (Program, Oct. 1977) of the report by Groenewegen and MarsHall ‘optical character recognition: the use of OCR techniques in decentralized data collection for bibliographic information systems’ somewhat misses both the point and the outcome of the investigation. Indeed, one might be led tobelieve that the difficulties encountered outweighed the benefits of the technique in the environment under consideration. The reverse is true. The investigators found that ‘the results have shown the feasibility of using OCR as a relatively simple technique for the preparation of input to computerised bibliographic information systems on a decentralized basis by countries that do not have the facility for preparing magnetic tape input. The main consideration is that centres preparing input should have access to sound equipment and the correct materials. However, the experiment showed that even flawed input could be processed and corrected very quickly and at a fraction of what it would cost to punch the input centrally’ (page 45).

Future historians, using the documentary evidence remaining, might well be excused for believing that online searching was a major activity in libraries and information services in the 1970s and 80s. The publication of several professional journals and the proceedings of regular, well‐attended conferences entirely devoted to the topic would suggest such a conclusion. In reality, the growth of online use in the publicly‐funded sector has been small, as can be judged by the relatively low levels of expenditure involved. For public libraries it has been estimated that spending on online services has been of the order of 0.1% of the total budgets. The average online expenditure of British universities has been about what it costs to employ one member of secretarial staff each.