Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Grainger Engineering Library Symposium [PAGE 30]

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ANSWER: (Mr. Wodgeworth) I think the real question is the rate of change. The trend Is Inevitable. List week the international publishing community met in Frankfurt, and most of the stories coming out of Frankfurt talked about the Impact of the electronic publishers Joining the other publishers, but they were only at this point representing about 18 to 20% of the number of publishers present at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I think what you can see Is that cost will enter into this heavily It is extremely expensive to print and publish journals and ship them around Che world. When you can reproduce this journal In electronic form, even if you print it locally for a short period of time where they don't have the capability of accessing it online, you are going to see these developments continue. You are going to see an increasing number of Journals. Right now there Is one vendor who can offer 7,000 journals in full text online, and the competition is catching up. So, there is going to be an increasing percentage of Journals that will be available online, but they will start at say 1985 or 1988. So, for a long time to come you will have a strong mix of the use of printed back files of journals with active use of current journals. That trend is definite, and you can see that in the future, that mix will change very rapidly. But I don't think that is the most important change that's going to happen. The really Important change Is when we begin to affect some of those constituencies that don't deal heavily with text—the artists, the musicians, and others— that's where the real change will occur in what will be available online. The journal problem is fairly simple compared to some of the problems of Incorporating different kinds of knowledge into what you have to learn. That's where you will see really dramatic change.

QUESTION: / know that it is a myth that libraries are "free. * but there is stillfree access to libraries. It is not at all clear that (here would be the same kind of free access to the information that will be available on electronic networks. Here at the university we are

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