The development of commercially available databases in Europe

The post‐war database revolution was triggered by ‘missions’ like health and nucleonics. In the last 10 years, the emphasis in databases has shifted from science and technology to business and softer disciplines, and from files of references (bibliographic files) to files of information (data banks). While Europe has outstripped the rest of the world in the number of bibliographic files, she lags behind in data banks and online availability. To get out of our information impasse we need to make intelligent use of new technologies like Viewdata and the European Communication Satellite, and find new ‘missions’.