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A number of distinct types of “electronic library” now exist. The term has shed the vagueness with which it has been used in the past. Moreover, certain forms of electronic library service will prove more effective and durable than others. The most successful form of electronic library will reproduce the functionality of the traditional library, but must also fully exploit the unique features of electronic information provision.

The GAELS Project is a two‐year project funded by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) strategic change initiative, which promotes collaborative information services to engineering researchers at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities. This paper examines the role of user education in this process. We use arguments against the effectiveness of library skills education and evaluative methods learned from human‐computer interface design as a means of improving information skills training and as part of a general reflection on user education and library services. Such an approach shows how networked learning materials can be an effective tool for promoting a collaborative library service across the Glasgow Metropolitan Area Network.

Traditional approaches to library training flourished in the period of hard copy collection building, when certain common generic skills, such as those of cataloguing and indexing, formed the bedrock of knowledge for many LIS professionals. The skills required in the digital library context are more heterogeneous, fluid and fast‐changing. They require a different training philosophy, one more closely identified with a “constructivist” approach to teaching and learning. This article attempts to flesh out these ideas by relating them to past and present practice, and sketches possible paths along which digital library training might evolve.

The paper explores the relationship between economics and scientific journal publishing in a number of areas by: establishing the fact, neglected by some librarians, that the “serials crisis” is not exclusively a plague infecting the STM sector, but that economics too has been badly affected; providing a more disaggregated analysis of the market power exerted by the dominant commercial publisher in economics journal publishing; considering briefly three academic‐led experiments aimed at improving scholarly communication in economics; comparing the policy stance taken by the UK Competition Commission on scientific publishing and on banking for small businesses in two recent reports and exposing its glaring inconsistency; and suggesting a modest proposal to remedy some of the inefficiencies identified in this paper.