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From diverse users' points of view, contextual frameworks are elaborated for the nature of the information technology, the information universe, and the information search. Within these conceptual parameters, established theories on search strategy are reviewed and cognitive models of information‐seeking are highlighted. Future directions for research on users' search processes are discussed in terms of the role for online retrieval in the future information environment.

We live in an age in which decisions made about information access today will have a profound impact on the libraries and librarians of tomorrow. Emerging new developments in information and communication technologies are already affecting the ways we organize work, seek information and develop innovations. Emerging hypertext and hypermedia systems promise to further support new levels of human creativity through explicitly linking related facts and ideas. Project development, too, requires the evolution of new working relationships between librarians, programmers and other team members. Such changes can best occur in the context of nontraditional organizational structures which nurture human creativity and innovativeness among its members.

“A generational shift…is just now beginning to unfold” as libraries convert, individually and collectively, into online public access utilities. Adopting an online public access catalog (OPAC) is increasingly signaling the subsequent provision of other electronic technologies that can be used directly by library patrons. Other bibliographic databases are typically added first, followed by numeric, statistical, and graphic databases. The library is becoming, in essence, a local online information utility.

The evolution of online instruction in the United States has been characterized by increasing sensitivity to the experiential contexts of end users. Two conceptual teaching models are described which recognize and extend end users' existent knowledge. The database model and the network model facilitate end users' interrogation of information retrieval (IR) systems through representation of systems' internal structures and functional outcomes. Evaluation results have shown that these instructional approaches cultivate end‐ users' development of mental models which enable them to make appropriate inferences and predictions during online decision making.

Few issues in recent times have so provoked debate and dissention within the library field as has the concept of fees for user services. The issue has aroused the passions of our profession precisely because its roots and implications extend far beyond the confines of just one service discipline. Its reflection is mirrored in national debates about the proper spheres of the public and private sectors—in matters of information generation and distribution, certainly, but in a host of other social ramifications as well, amounting virtually to a debate about the most basic values which we have long assumed to constitute the very framework of our democratic and humanistic society.

The following is an annotated list of materials dealing with orientation to library facilities and services, instruction in the use of information resources, and research and computer skills related to retrieving, using, and evaluating information. This review, the sixteenth to be published in Reference Services Review, includes items in English published in 1989. A few are not annotated because the compiler could not obtain copies of them for this review.

The following is an annotated list of materials dealing with information literacy including instruction in the use of information resources, research, and computer skills related to retrieving, using, and evaluating information. This review, the eighteenth to be published in Reference Services Review, includes items in English published in 1991. A few are not annotated because the compiler could not obtain copies of them for this review.

The following is an annotated list of materials dealing with orientation to library facilities and services, instruction in the use of information resources, and research and computer skills that are related to retrieving and using information. This is the fourteenth review to be published in Reference Services Review and lists items in English published in 1987. A few items are not annotated because the compiler could not obtain copies of them for this review.

The following is an annotated list of materials dealing with orientation to library facilities and services, instruction in the use of information resources, and computer skills related to information gathering. This is RSR's twelfth annual review of this literature and lists items published in 1985. A few references are not annotated because the compiler could not obtain copies of them for the review.

Arizona State University (ASU) West is a new, upper division undergraduate and graduate campus serving western Maricopa County and metropolitan Phoenix. The students are typically working adults from the community who come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Most are drawn from the local community colleges, where they complete their first two years of college before entering ASU West.