EDUCAUSE Review Articles and Digital Library Services

Libraries are successful to the extent that they can bridge communities and can leverage the diversity of the quest, the research, and the discovery. By building bridges among various sectors, libraries will be able to define themselves in the next generation.

The authors discuss recent studies conducted to gage the academic librarian's and faculty member's view on the increasing use and offering of electronic resources. One could conclude from the studies that the "transition to an electronic environment poses significant strategic and management challenges for higher education" and that there is a "need for libraries to take leadership in helping academia's transition to the new environment".

Experiments are underway to provide library users with a browsable, electronic Table of Contents for books that are shared in a distributed collection environment.

Deep into the digital age, academic libraries have relinquished much of their fundamental and sustaining role. For most people, including academicians, the library—in its most basic function as a source of information—has become overwhelmingly a virtual destination.