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The development of the ResIDe Electronic Library at the University of the West of England, Bristol, is traced from its origins as an eLib funded research project. Different aspects of the system are analysed through their potential to increase economy, efficiency and effectiveness in library services. This analysis is related to the utility that it can provide to differing sponsors and the likelihood of their making supporting resources available. While economy and efficiency are relatively easy concepts to define and use, effectiveness can be both contested and multifaceted, varying in accordance with both subjective preference and interests represented. Competing views of effectiveness needed to be balanced whilst emphasising those aspects of the system that would appeal to senior UWE management in a time of the rising “audit society” in higher education.

The necessity for closer engagement with the academic community was one of the more important conclusions to emerge from the ResIDe Electronic Reserve Project at the University of the West of England. Academic and library staff must work more closely in selecting materials, promoting services, training and guiding students in using/processing information held on electronic reserves if these electronic systems are to become important library resources. A current study, investigating electronic reserves’ potential role in both supporting current pedagogic practices and initiating innovative teaching and learning methods, has immediately highlighted the importance of developing such close relationships to ensure an efficient and cost‐effective service.

Digital services can solve some problems facing print‐based academic libraries. They also provide opportunities for librarians to become proactive by adopting pivotal roles in shaping their institutions’ teaching and learning strategies. Digital collections take information outside libraries’ physical confines. As managers of digital information systems, librarians cannot remain mere intermediaries, though some find that digital collections present unwanted learning challenges and threats to current working practices. Librarians must develop new roles and working practices and initiate the cultural changes that will alter others’ perceptions of them. An electronic collection can underpin current pedagogic styles, initiate new teaching and learning practices and support lifelong learning skills through the close collaboration and interchange of professional academic and librarian roles. The potentiality of such collaboration is currently being explored through the expansion of the ResIDe Electronic Library at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

The Hybrid Library of the Future (HyLiFe) project is a Phase 3 Electronic Libraries (eLib) project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee. The project is concerned with how best to deliver the print and electronic services likely to be required of higher education libraries in the foreseeable future. HyLiFe is a UK‐wide project involving six higher education institutions. The project is developing a series of customer‐orientated electronic interfaces or Websites which will give access to electronic and print services. A wide range of users groups are involved in the project including full‐time students, researchers, users in distributed environments and various subject. groupings. The project began in 1998 and will run for three years.

The Scottish Collaborative On‐demand Publishing Enterprise (SCOPE) was a project funded from 1995 to 1998 as part of the UK’s Electronic Libraries (eLib) programme. SCOPE was involved with providing students with access to key course readings either via course packs or electronically via the Internet. The project achieved its aims of providing improved access, developing a model copyright permissions agreement, and developing a secure user‐authentication and delivery method. At the end of the SCOPE Project, eLib accepted a bid from the project team and other partners to provide a national on‐demand service, known as HERON (Higher Education Resources ON‐demand). This has similar aims to SCOPE, but on a UK‐wide scale with a view to start providing an active service in January 2000.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the themes and aims of this Accounting, Auditing & Accountability (AAAJ) special issue and comments on the papers included in the issue. The paper provides a thematic outline along which the future researchers can undertake more empirical research examining how neoliberalism shapes, and shaped by, management accounting.

This entails a brief review of the previous critical accounting works that refer to liberalism and neoliberalism to identify and highlight the specific themes and trajectories of neoliberal implications of management accounting has been and can be explored. This is followed by a brief commentary on the papers the authors have included in this special issue; these commentaries explain how these papers capture various dimensions of enabling and enacting neoliberal governmentality.

The authors found that management accounting is now entering new territories beyond its conventional disciplinary enclosures of confinement, reconfiguring its functionalities to enable and enact a circulatory mode of neoliberal governmentality. These new functionalities then produce and reproduce entrepreneurial selves in myriad forms of social connections, networks and platforms within and beyond formal organizational settings, amid plethora of conducts, counter-conducts and resistances and new forms of identities and subjectivities.

This review can be read in relation to the papers included in the special issue as the whole issue will inspire more ideas, frameworks and methodologies for further studies.

There is little research reviewing and commenting how management accounting now being enacted and enabled with new functionalities operating new territories and reconfiguring forms of governmentality. This paper inspires a new agenda on this project.