Editorial
Mark Smith

We’ve all heard the caution to "be careful what you wish for—you might get it." Usually our response is something like, "yeah, whatever." But now that we enter what could be considered the period of maturity of library Internet services, some librarians might be recalling these words with more sobriety.

Three or four short years ago the buzz in the library field was how to avoid being left out of the information revolution. Corny meta-phors proliferated: would libraries end up as a cul-de-sac and librarians road-kill on the Information Superhighway? You don’t hear this dis-cussion much anymore because it has been decided. Policy makers at the local, state, and national levels—and to an extent the public as well—have accepted the key role that school, public, and academic libraries will play in insuring universal citizen access to electronic information. But that victory has its consequences.

Filtering issues in public libraries, of course, come in close to the top of the list of challenges raised by the Internet, but the list is longer than that. Academic librarians who met in September in Austin for the Texas Council of State University Librarians (joined by colleagues from com-munity college and private college and university libraries), began to come to terms with some of these issues. They heard from William Potter of the University of Georgia Libraries about GALILEO, a project modeled on TexShare, but which has quickly outstripped its Texas counterpart in funding (which is 10 times that of Tex-Share), resources offered, and participation. This last is indicative of one dilemma faced by resource-sharing projects: who shares? Library leaders in Georgia have envisioned and have nearly realized a single, common library resource-sharing network for academic, public, and school libraries, all of which participate in GALILEO.

How our organizations change to accommodate networked services also poses challenges. The new Knowledge Management Center at The University of Texas at Austin is just such an attempt to pull these projects together in a single unit (see page 159). Similarly, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission has reorganized to bring TexShare, the Texas State Electronic Library, the Texas Records and Information Locator (TRAIL) project, and statewide interlibrary loan under one roof called the Library Resource Sharing Division (see Robert Martin’s article page 152).

Perhaps the plaintive tone of Harold Billings’s remarks from TCSUL (page 155) reflects a growing sentiment among librarians: a mingled awe at how far we have come and apprehension at where we might be going. Billings cautions that in embracing these wonderful new information networks we must "not let them make us unknowingly lay waste the information infrastructure that our phys-ical collections have so long sustained." And perhaps this is the most significant challenge: how to meaningfully integrate the print and electronic libraries and how to articulate the need for both.

Bill Potter alluded to the same issue, saying that it is easy to oversell the value and benefit of the elec-tronic library, causing libraries to suffer a backlash from funding agencies that believed that funding mechanisms for information delivery meant actually delivering information. As Potter explained, networks leverage investment, but rarely do they save money.

Explaining why we now need more money for content, why electronic networks do not replace print collections, why broad access to common sources is crucial, why filtered access is problematic at best, why staff with information management expertise cost more, and why rapidly changing technology requires more frequent reorganization—these are some of the questions that will define our work for the coming years. And much about the success of our programs depends upon the strength of our answers.