Library Services in the New Electronic Era
	The Technical Problem of Remote Access to Online Information Databases

Library Services in the New Electronic Era

The New Era of Dispersion

• Today libraries are seeing a rapid shift to a new dynamic of information access based on dispersion.
• The rapid and widespread growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web has accelerated the social acceptant of electronic information exchange.
• Patrons have come to expect instant gratification for each and every information request.
• Patrons are no longer content with merely electronic delivery of bibliographic citations or even online abstracts, but now expect to view full text, images, and graphics with up-to-the-minute currency.
• Just as significantly, the top managers of educational institutions at every level are increasingly building the financial and business models of their institutions on their ability to leverage electronic access to provide new growth and competitive advantage.
• Initiatives such as opening branch campuses in new markets, offering distance learning courses, independent off-campus study and home learning programs are all grounded at least in part on access to electronic technology and information access

• Today the marketplace is overflowing with sources of online information. In addition to the vast amounts of information freely accessible on the Internet, copyrighted material is being offered in increasing comprehensive formats not only by the traditional indexing and abstracting aggregators, but also by publishers directly.
• Such information resources offer new, complex challenges to the librarian in attempting to measure their relevance to patrons. When compared to their print-based ancestors, these new databases are almost ephemeral, with constantly changing title compositions, user interfaces, search engines, data structures and information formats.
• At the same time, the type and variety of patrons and their information requirements for accessing electronic resources is becoming more varied.
• Part time students
• remote campus locations
• distance learning programs
• other forms of non-traditional learning

• In today's world, the majority of commercial online information flows from one or more than one (increasingly, more than one) remote vendor's web-server, through the Internet, to the contracting library.
• Management information about this flow; for example, transaction volumes, numbers of concurrent users, frequency of access to specific titles, response time of the vendor's system, uptime of the vendor's system, etc., is almost exclusively under the control of the supplying vendor. To the extent that this information is available or is accurate is entirely up to the vendor.
• Additionally, vendor contracts require the library to be responsible for limiting access to qualified library patrons; but the vendor can only provide rudimentary authentication based on campus located IP addresses or a limited number of passwords.
• In particular, the contracting library is given responsibility for managing access from outside the campus IP address space. This is precisely the area of emerging priority for remote patron access.
• In some cases, online service vendors will issue a limited number of Userid/Passwords. If given out to only one individual the numbers are too few to be meaningful; but if assigned to many individuals all individual responsibility is taken away and all real control is lost.

This obviously presents a dilemma to the library. On the one hand, the pressure to provide access is constantly growing, on the other hand, there is no readily available means by which the library can authorize and manage remote access.

• Even more importantly, the limitations of current vendor provided authentication methods make it impossible for librarians to know who is using what resources or to be able to permit selective access to only the most relevant elements of the library's online information resources for a particular patron group.
• In this sense, online information systems have represented a very real decrease in workability to librarians.
• Many librarians feel that with regard to remote electronic access they cannot provide the personal, professional mediation of the patron's information search that is the very essence of librarianship.

The emerging challenge is to find tools that will permit continuation of this professional service in an environment in which both the information resources and the patrons are both remotely located.