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The Albert R. Mann Library at Cornell University has created a working electronic library and has made significant changes in services and staff responsibilities to address users' evolving needs. This article presents an overview of these changes, after discussing the development of electronic libraries at Mann and elsewhere. The increased usage that Mann's collections have received as the electronic library has been developed is also described.

Results of an in‐depth study of the electronic publishing (EP) industry, with particular emphasis on the consumer marketplace, are presented. EP was defined as the use of electronic media to deliver information to users in electronic form or from electronic sources. EP is contrasted to electronic‐aided publishing, which is the use of electronic means to format and produce a conventional information product. An “information chain” model of the information flows between publishers (or producers) and users was helpful in understanding the boundaries of EP and defining its markets. Following a review of the conventional publishing industry, a model of the forces driving the EP industry was derived. Although technology is the strongest driving force, it is by no means the only one; the others are economics, demographics, social trends, government policies, applications growth, and industry trends. Each of these forces is described in detail in a “cause and effect” scenario, from which keys to success in the EP marketplace are derived. Although there is some turmoil in the industry, with new services continuing to appear and disappear, the overall picture is one of optimism. EP should be a significant part of consumers' lives by the end of the decade.

The evolution of technology in libraries is causing more technically oriented professionals to join the library profession. Having an electronic services librarian has become a hallmark of the electronic age. Many imaginative but similar job titles appear in library employment advertisements: “Network Services Librarian,” “Reference and Electronic Information Services Librarian,” “Electronic Information and Multimedia Librarian,” “Information Integrator.” Why is this new field in librarianship so popular? What are the requirements to be an “electronic services librarian?” What will their future be like? Is this new professional the answer to all new library technology developments? This article examines these questions and explores the problems in this emerging position by analyzing the experience of one academic library.

Federal government agencies increasingly use electronic bulletin board technology as a means of providing access to and dissemination of electronic government information. This paper identifies and analyzes existing government bulletin boards (BBSs). It also assesses the types of information available to information users on the BBSs as well as the cost and technological access issues involved in federal agency use of BBSs. Furthermore, the paper presents a typology of bulletin boards. Finally, it discusses information policy implications resulting from BBS development, especially with regard to access and dissemination of electronic government information. These “new” access mechanisms are often‐times difficult to use, are poorly deployed and operated, and may serve to limit access to some types of government information.

To meet the challenges of the electronic library, technical services staff members must be able to articulate the value they add to the institution—not only in the realm of the library's bibliographic database but also in the larger context of building an organizational framework for electronic information and services. Technical services departments must be willing to re‐engineer processing activities and equip their staffs with both the hardware and the skills needed to meet these challenges. In Mann Library, the digital or electronic library is being built upon the traditional infrastructure of the library. Responsibilities related to selecting, acquiring, describing, and servicing networked information are mainstreamed into the operations of the library. This article describes three projects that illustrate the range of activities in which technical services staff are engaged. In these projects, technical services staff have been called upon to provide an organizational framework for numeric, full‐text, and bibliographic information.

The management of autonomous, heterogeneous network resources and services provides new challenges which libraries are now addressing. This paper outlines an approach based on the construction of broker services which mediate access to resources. It outlines a framework – the MODELS Information Architecture – for thinking about the components of broker services and their logical arrangement. It describes several development projects and services which show how brokers are developing. It uses examples drawn from the serials environment to describe some of the issues. Technologists understand that they must build more stable and unobtrusive media. They must establish more coherent contexts into which the technology may disappear.

Materials for teaching, learning and research are moving into the digital sphere. This move is affecting scholarly communication, teaching and learning in the academic community in important ways. These are significant changes, operating at technical, service, organisational and cultural levels. In this paper we wish to examine some of these changes. However, our aims are modest: we will focus on technical developments and on some of the emerging services that these are making possible.

The purpose of this paper is to extend significantly the technology acceptance model (TAM) of Davis to design an extended TAM model to be used in the evaluation and assessment of e-information services for information research such as e-library services. The present TAM extension is based on two variables of behavioral intention: the perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of a system. Furthermore, the user satisfaction, free access, information architecture, content richness, policies and rules, publishers’ quality, system self-efficacy and task technology fit were incorporated into the TAM to extend it with other factors theoretically motivated and would be of interest more generally.

The researcher adopted an experimental approach-based comparison between an experimental group (107 researchers) using an electronic information service (the e-library service of the university) and a control group (107 researchers) not registered in this e-information service of the university.

The researcher used the effect size values based t-test independent samples at the 0.05 level to adapt the structural model equation to the experimental sample. Principal results show that the behavioral intention was influenced significantly by user satisfaction. The perceived usefulness of the e-library services was influenced significantly by the perceived ease of use, information architecture, content richness, free access, publishers’ quality, task-technology fit and e-library service self-efficacy.

This paper is useful in advancing a framework for the evaluation and assessment of the electronic information service used for information research and exploring users’ attitudes toward using that service.

This paper reports findings from the first annual cycle of a three‐year research project on the provision and use of electronic information systems (EIS) within higher education in the UK. The project, JISC User Surveys: Trends in Electronic Information Services (JUSTEIS), was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and undertaken at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (UWA). Students, academics and library staff in 25 universities were surveyed using critical incident and critical success factors methodologies to ascertain the range and nature of EIS use. Provision of these systems by higher education institutions was also investigated via an analysis of their library websites. The findings reported in this paper focus on student use and the purposes for which EIS are employed, and reveal the limited array of EIS used and the ad hoc nature of search strategies adopted across undergraduate and postgraduate bodies within a range of disciplines. There appears to be little or no variation in the pattern of EIS use by the various student groups studied – the effect of the Internet on information seeking by students is hugely significant and the more formal resources, such as JISC‐negotiated resources are little used. There is little evidence of coherent search strategies used by students. Recommendations for both the JISC and higher education are offered.

The increasing use of information technology in providing library services is an attractive and economic means of delivering knowledge to the user. However, it also generates a critical challenge that must be addressed: providing services electronically to users who are off‐site. Explores the issues relating to developing the user skills and competencies of distanced users, and examines the implications for the provision of information services in electronic information environments. Highlights the need to maintain a clear understanding of users and their difficulties in accessing electronic information services. Electronic information service needs to focus more effectively on training users in information search, increasing the types of electronic support to users, and raising the profile of the information services to maintain its market share. To achieve this, information services will need to become much more attuned to the information needs and usage patterns of the hidden user.