Document delivery, now and in the future

Although no library has ever been self‐sufficient, full recognition of local insufficiency has developed only in fairly recent times, as the output of published material has grown at an unprecedented rate and at the same time its bibliographic control has improved enormously, even though computer‐based bibliographic searches generate only a small minority (one‐seventh or one‐eighth) of document requests. Some means of access to external resources becomes increasingly necessary, and new possibilities for achieving this seem to be dawning. The implications of moving from a ‘holdings strategy to an access strategy’, as suggested in the recent LISC Report, are far‐reaching; I propose to touch on some of these in this paper. The major revolution is that technology appears to be on the verge of making it possible, perhaps even easy, to transmit texts to users over long distances.