How network and information access are priced will affect the ability of new users and communities to engage with the information infrastructure. Linking access and service to ability to pay would be inherently exclusionary. This problem lies behind consumer group and state regulatory efforts to moderate the pace of infrastructure advances and tariff changes.
For the research and education communities in particular, an increasing emphasis on network-based access to information raises questions about whether there is a need for a minimum level of access – and what that level is, how basic it is in terms of the quality of service (speed, support for video or multimedia, and so on), the locus of access (on each desk or in each classroom or in such communal and institutional facilities as libraries), and the breadth of reach (within a state or region, national and/ or international, connections to which information provider gateways, and so on).
Tomorrow it is clear that the mix of services will change in two ways. First, the format will change; there will be more video, audio, multimedia, and real-time services, in contrast to the flat text and binary data files that dominate Internet traffic today. Second, there will be more third-party providers of information, which will be offered on a free or at-cost basis by government and on a revenue-generating/profit-making basis by commercial providers.
Standards and protocols will … be needed for those users of digital libraries who may lack the needed skills to effectively utilize the networked environment and who may not have a librarian to call upon.
Notable among the technical issues relating to library participation in an NII is the need for librarians – working together with publishers and other information providers, research users, and information and computer scientists – to develop standards, common formats, and controls that will permit users to identify, locate, and access needed resources in a consistent fashion.
Broad use of digitized resources outside of a library facility with professional staff is expected to increase with home-based and other remote access to information infrastructure. Overall, the future role of libraries will evolve to reflect and interact with developments in individual, personal-information retrieval systems and also developments in the publishing arena and other sources of supply for electronic information resources.
Creation of digital libraries will likely exacerbate information management and policy issues and will require additional research to resolve problems that may thwart progress … They relate to freedom of expression, intellectual property, access, privacy and confidentiality, security concerns that include the integrity and reliability of the date resources, and the preservation and archiving of data res ources. The nature of the technologies either exacerbates existing tensions (e.g., relating to copyright and fair use) or presents new questions and opportunities to rethink existing practices.
In the near future, the focus will be on access to and use of research materials and collections generally inaccessible but of extreme resear ch value, including photographs, satellite and related spatial data, archival data, videos and movies, sound recordings, slides of paintings and other artifacts, and more.
Internet access enables libraries to leverage their resources so as to acquire more of the scholarly record, and to own materials collectively and share them between libraries and their end users. In the years ahead, libraries will communicate and provide access to information in a variety of formats – digital, voice, graphic – and employ multimedia technologies via a ubiquitous and seamless web of interrelated networks. Public access programs and policies proposed and implemented today will be central to this emerging information infrastructure.
The potential for information infrastructure to support paraprofessionals and allied health professionals in medicine, for example, is already in evidence. An extension of this facility will be seen in the growing number of information entrepreneurs providing information for a fee to laypersons on selected professional subjects using such resources as electronic bulletin boards and specially designed electronic libraries