The arrival and exponential growth of information resources in electronic formats has created significant challenges for librarians. Questions abound about how to deliver both traditional and new library services in an information landscape that encompasses both formats. If one wants to come quickly up to speed with some of the most relevant issues and answers, then this is the right place to start. For more specific details or examples, readers are encouraged to search the plethora of library related media, blogs, listserv postings, and various social networking sites.
The editor has assembled eight articles by respected experts that discuss shifts in information resource consumption, using print/digital formats to mutually complement each other, library design/renovation, JSTOR as a digital model for scholarly information preservation, preservation of digitally‐born news, reference collection development, cooperative digital collection development, and print journal cessation.
This work begins with an article by Fred Heath (University of Texas Libraries), who justifies his decision to transform UT's undergraduate library in order to best to meet modern‐day user needs. Next, Joan Lippincott (Coalition for Networked Information) addresses how print and digital worlds can be used in tandem to enhance and augment each other's importance, which ultimately enhances user engagement/learning. Similar to Heath's earlier chapter, Joseph Branin (Ohio State University Libraries) discusses the processes involved with OSU's $100 million research library renovation.
Michael Spinella (JSTOR) provides an historical account of JSTOR's developments, which can serve as a model for other such scholarly journal archives. Bernard Reilly, Jr (Center for Research Libraries) elaborates on the largely‐unheeded challenge of collecting and preserving the world's digitally‐born news. Next, Michael Buckland (University of California, Berkeley) writes about the electronic reference collection and how it is lagging behind in terms of search functionality. Buckland shares specific examples from his studies.
How does one collect cooperatively in a digital world? Dan Hazen (Harvard College) helps readers become proactive in addressing this change. Last, Karen Hunter (Elsevier) outlines both the library and commercial publisher issues related to whether a journal becomes available only in electronic format.
Overall, these articles give readers a small but diverse sampling of perspectives that illustrate how to successfully intermingle the realms of print and digital formats. While the brevity of this publication makes a quick and relatively informative read, be advised the issue of a hybrid library is more complex than portrayed here.
