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The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of resource‐sharing trends in the USA and internationally.

The article uses personal experience and views supported with background literature.

The article highlights recent developments in resource‐sharing standards, updated resource‐sharing statistics, describes new initiatives, and explores the implications of recent corporate mergers and product withdrawals.

The article provides a high level, and personal view of selected trends in North American resource sharing.

Several members of this journal’s editorial advisory board give brief views on how they see the future of interlending and document supply. The article concludes with an overview of these contributions, together with additional comments by an editorial board member

Describes what the author of this column envisages for the future of this regular feature. Gives a brief outline of her career history, commenting on the changes in working practices within ILL operations.

The Global Resources Program (GRP) seeks to improve access to international research materials through cooperative structures and the use of new technology. GRP, a joint initiative of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has launched six projects to test varying models of access. The six projects are in different stages of development and have different levels of North American and international participation. All projects share common challenges and potential barriers. This paper reviews these challenges and barriers and suggests strategies to overcome them. The realization that North American research libraries are no longer able to collect comprehensively provides an opportunity for the global interlibrary loan and document supply community to provide access to and delivery of materials needed by scholars and researchers, regardless of location of the material or the scholar.

The AAU/ARL (Association of American Universities/Association of Research Libraries) Japan Journal Access Project seeks to expand access to research materials published in Japan, and to coordinate collection development activities of Japanese‐language material held by North American research libraries. Established in 1994, the focus of the Japan Project has evolved from providing access to scientific and technical serials published in Japan to providing access to Japanese language materials held by Japanese and North American libraries. The Union List of Japanese Serials and Newspapers and the Association of National University Libraries (ANUL) and Waseda document‐delivery projects have emerged as key activities. Collaborative collection development remains an important, but unrealized, goal. Suggestions for future developments are made.

The consequences of electronic publishing continue to manifest themselves in the 110 journals scanned for this literature review. Pricing, access, e‐books and e‐journals are amongst the issues considered in this issue’s literature review. Further criticism of the publishing sector is identified and the potential for micro payments.

Examines the nature, background, development, testing, advantages, and creative uses of Ariel, a software package that can send, receive and print images of documents via the Internet. Compares the capabilities of Ariel to fax transmissions. Surmises that Ariel offers benefits of higher resolution, telecommunications charges, transmission time, and flexibility, giving it the potential to become de facto standard for image transmission and to reduce turnaround time.

This paper provides examples of how the document access environment in the United States has changed since James L. Wood described it in 1978. The paper also summarizes several new developments in document access.