Scholarly communication in an electronic environment; problems and challenges

Introduction It is considered unfashionable in many quarters to announce oneself as a librarian. Yet librarians have produced one of the most remarkable feats of international co-operation in the last fifty years, which has gone unheralded, unannounced, but whose characteristics should be informing the development of standards for the Internet and the World Wide Web. Indeed so great is that success that we take it absolutely for granted. Broadly speaking it is possible to identify any recent published work from anywhere in the world and whether or not one has identified a location for the item to borrow it or a facsimile of it either free or for a very small sum. This article will reflect on that success and on its relevance to the development of electronic information where a dangerous complacency assumes that our skills are so minor and/or our influence so limited that we must cede the field to larger players. It will argue that our skills are in fact entirely appropriate to developing the scholarly infrastructure which is so glaringly missing from the Internet and the Web. As a convenience, the building blocks will be split into two groups, reflecting IFLA’s original core programmes of Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC) and Universal Availability of Publications (UAP). This model is used because it is through international bodies such as IFLA that this success has been sponsored and achieved.1