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In today's high tech environment, it is far too easy to sit back and complain about all the money that it takes to run a library and far more difficult to do anything about it. Gone are the days of the library whose costs consisted mainly of books, librarians, and buildings. Few people today, even fewer librarians, really understand the complexity of this small “city” of workers and the related costs required to run today's library. Computer systems, CD‐ROM towers, bar‐code readers, video tapes, these are the materials of today's library.

Offers a particular forecast of library networking in coming years, within the context of individual libraries. Foresees library networking as being completely dependent on computer client/server approaches; library patrons or staff should be able to go to a single workstation and access all resources local or remotely as needed; systems will be patron friendly, and there will be less dependence on the printed word. Asserts that library networking will be based on a wireless environment that will facilitate highly mobile computing and access to information services.

As CD‐ROM becomes more and more a standard reference and technical support tool in all types of libraries, the annual review of this technology published in Computers in Libraries magazine increases in size and scope. This year, author Susan L. Adkins has prepared this exceptionally useful bibliography which she has cross‐referenced with a subject index.

Demonstrates how the complex and detailed task of creating a bibliography, involving compiling data,formatting it into a style sheet, revising the text, and printing the product can be simplified by using various software packages that automatically format bibliographic data into desired style.

Since its origins during the Second World War, the computer industry has grown more rapidly than any other technology in history, and this growth has spawned a wealth of new terms and manners‐of‐speaking to describe computers and the uses to which they can be put. Such terms are often referred to collectively as computerese. The thesis of Barry's entertaining book is that the use of computerese is increasingly being extended to a wealth of other subjects that are often totally unrelated to computing. Barry refers to this use (or abuse) of language as technobabble: the subject matter and the pleasingly tongue‐in‐cheek style can be judged from the introduction, which starts as follows: ‘This paper‐based, productized bookware module is designed to support the robust implementation of a friendly, context‐driven interface between the developer and the end‐user. Did you understand this sentence? If so, you are fluent in technobabble’.