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The various methods of providing an interlibrary loan service include centralised lending, interlending through union catalogues and direct interlending. These services can be compared by estimating the cost per loan, average service time and failure rate. This provides a simple model of the cost effectiveness of the alternatives, which can be used to predict the effects of changes in the level of demand or funds available.

This article aims to discuss some of the principal digital libraries projects during the 1990s and the impact that they had on modern libraries.

The paper combines information from contemporary papers about the projects with recollections by the author who was personally associated with many of the projects.

The paper reveals that, about 1990, computing reached a point where it became economically possible to mount large collections online and to access them over networks. The result was a flurry of experiments and prototypes. Many are almost forgotten, yet the libraries of today were formed by the energy and creativity of these efforts. The paper places some of the most influential projects in context and discusses why some prototypes and experiments succeeded while others fell by the wayside.

Several of the projects were never described formally in the academic literature, and there are no contemporary records to check some of the author's recollections.

The value of this paper is that many of the projects that formed the libraries of today were poorly documented and it is already difficult to find good information about some of them.

This paper describes the use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting in the NSF’s National Science Digital Library (NSDL). The protocol is used both as a method to ingest metadata into a central Metadata Repository and also as the means by which the repository exports metadata to service providers. The NSDL Search Service is used to illustrate this architecture. An early version of the Metadata Repository was an alpha test site for version 1 of the protocol and the production repository was a beta test site for version 2. This paper describes the implementation experience and early practical tests. Despite some teething troubles and the long‐term difficulties of semantic compatibility, the overall conclusion is optimism that the Open Archive Initiative will be a successful part of the NSDL.

Attempts to deal with the issue of how we can educate the next generation of leaders for the information needs of the future.

Uses a case study: the thinking behind the new information science program at Cornell University.

Advocates a broad view of information science. In a rapidly changing world, leadership will come from flexible thinking based on a broad understanding of technology and the social sciences. In the American terminology, information science should be considered a liberal art, not a profession. An education in information science provides an excellent foundation for a career in libraries, publishing or information services, but there are many more career opportunities for somebody with this education.

Most recent initiatives in information science have come from professional schools of librarianship. By starting from a liberal arts viewpoint, universities may be meeting the needs of a very wide audience.

Explores the author's experience working in the digital library field during his first year as a professional. The fluidity of contracts and titles is discussed, and the needs for improved IT skills, the involvement of librarians in digital content creation and closer collaboration between professionals in all sectors are all noted.

Over the past eight years, the MELVYL catalog has become one of the largest public access catalogs in the world, and now plays a central role in providing access to the library resources of the University of California. Currently, under heavy load, the MELVYL catalog supports many hundreds of simultaneous terminal connections, servicing over a quarter of a million queries a week and displaying more than two million records a week to its user community. This article discusses the history of the network that has supported the MELVYL catalog from the early days of its prototype to the present. It also describes both the current technical and policy issues that must be addressed as the network moves into the 1990s, and the roles that the network is coming to play in integrating local automation, the union catalog, access to resource databases, and other initiatives. Sidebars discuss the TCP/IP protocol suite, internet protocol gateways, and Telenet and related inter‐operability problems.

While Gutenberg's invention is likely to endure for some time, it is indisputable that the prominence of print is diminishing. The recently published Mellon report University Libraries and Scholarly Communication highlights the symbiosis between the humanities and the print medium. It maintains that electronic media will ultimately change the nature of the humanities and spawn a new kind of discourse with fundamentally different features. The report asserts that the shift from print to electronic media, which began in the late twentieth century, will have widespread consequences on the intellectual experience of modern society, reaching beyond print and libraries.

The Carnegie Mellon University Library Information System (LIS), introduced in March 1986, is one of the most popular services the university libraries have offered. Distributed access to online library catalogs and other computer‐based information resources is no longer a novel approach to library services. However, Carnegie Mellon's LIS is unusual in several respects. The search interface and retrieval system, though based on IBM's STAIRS proprietary retrieval software, were custom designed by the libraries’ staff. In addition, since LIS access is not password‐controlled, anyone with access to both the campus asynchronous and TCP networks can use the system. Moreover, the Carnegie Mellon environment is particularly well suited to innovation and experimentation that goes beyond merely providing access from terminals in faculty offices or public terminal clusters. The Andrew system, an extensive campuswide network of powerful personal workstations under development by the university and IBM, is the basis for much innovation in applications of computing to teaching and research. By linking basic information resources to the Andrew campus network, the university libraries will increase the integration of information resources with routine class assignments and research.

To provide an overview of one person's involvement with computer systems in libraries over the last 40 years.

Personal memories corroborated with published articles.

There have been very many developments in libraries in a comparatively short period of time as a result of using computer systems, and this may only be the start of a revolution.

Of relevance to anyone interested in historical aspects of library automation.