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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.

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.

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.

This essay comments on what three eminent UW-Madison economists taught during the first half of the 20th century: John R. Commons (1862–1945), Selig Perlman (1886–1959), and Martin Bronfenbrenner (1914–1997). What we know about what and how they taught varies. Interestingly, little or no effort has been made to preserve records that might inform us about what college and university economists taught their students and when and how new ideas and issues found their way into the teaching of economics. This thought first came to me in the years immediately following my joining the UW-Madison faculty in January 1965. I realized that many of us who gained experience in the policy arena while on leave in Washington DC during the 1960s incorporated that experience into our teaching at all course levels. This meant our students benefited from being on the cutting edge of emerging policy issues, such as poverty, negative income tax, human capital, military draft, and the all-volunteer army, the Kennedy round trade negotiations, tax policy, and cost–benefit analysis. We regularly incorporated these issues into our teaching, usually a half-dozen years before they made their way into the next edition of the textbooks and thus reached a wider student audience. Once incorporated into textbooks, these issues became much less interesting to teach because they had been boiled down to pedestrian textbook-style prose.

EVEN when it rains, and it did rain, Edinburgh has many attractions. It is a fine centre for a conference with some splendid libraries to visit and this year, as in other years, our hosts put themselves out to make us welcome.

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.