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The third International Conference on Data Bases in the Humanities and Social Sciences was held on June 10–12, 1983, at Rutgers University, sponsored by the Rutgers University Libraries, with financial support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Rutgers University.

To a great extent the work of humanists and electronic text center librarians is at the forefront of realizing the potential of new media for research and instruction. It goes beyond how the library typically is viewed in the digital arena, which is providing access to digital content for information retrieval. The skills that electronic text center librarians have developed have much to offer other disciplines about the potential of the text for creative exploration and the overall development of the digital library. These include the understanding of interoperability, knowledge of standards, text markup and quality control, connection with users and disciplinary needs, technical skills for text creation and scanning and an understanding of the intrinsic qualities of the material to be studied. CETH and electronic text centers have helped to create a community of users by focussing attention on common goals and themes. These goals and themes now can be encompassed in a larger arena.

Libraries must actively support humanities text files, but we must remember that to focus exclusively on texts tied to specific systems is to put ourselves in opposition to the needs of the researchers we intend to serve. A working model of the sort of system and resource provision that is appropriate is described. The system, one put in place at the University of Michigan, is the result of several years of discussions and investigation. While by no means the only model upon which to base such a service, it incorporates several features that are essential to the support of these materials: standardized, generalized data; the reliance on standards for the delivery of information; and remote use. Sidebars discuss ARTFL, a textual database; the Oxford Text Archive; InteLex; the Open Text Corporation; the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI); the machine‐readable version of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d edition; and the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities.

The purpose of this paper is to present an organized view of current trends affecting academic libraries that one research library developed to encourage new thinking; this view could assist others seeking to help their organizations think differently about the future of information access and management.

One strategy for identifying important trends using a small number of key resources is highlighted in the paper. A snapshot of the many trends affecting academic libraries is categorized to show interrelationships and to provide specific examples along with a general overview. Included is a brief description of how the snapshot was used by one library. Implications for the future and perspectives on the value of cultivating new thinking are presented in the conclusion.

The paper finds that rapid and far‐reaching change is challenging libraries to think very differently, to act much more quickly, and to set trends rather than merely react to them. Assessing trends can help libraries foster organizational change through exposure to new ideas and see where new partnerships and areas of expertise must be developed to meet new needs.

The snapshot became the basis for two library‐wide events at Ohio State that better positioned attendees to inform and to accommodate decisions about service priorities, personnel and budget requests.

This paper organizes many diverse trends into a general overview to make inter‐relationships and implications more understandable to those unlikely to develop such a view on their own – for example: university personnel outside the library, middle managers and those they supervise within the library, students of library and information management.

The evolution of the concept of an Adaptive Network Library Interface is described and several technical and research issues are explored. The Adaptive Network Library Interface (ANLI) is a computer program that stands as a buffer between users of the library catalog and the catalog itself. This buffer unit maintains its own network of pointers from book to book, which it elicits from the users, interactively. It is hoped that such a buffer increases the value of the catalog for the users and provides librarians with new and useful information about the books in the collection. The relation to concepts such as hypertext and neural networks is explored as well.

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.