Libraries and the internet: The 1994 New Zealand Library and Information Association: Te Rau Herenga o Aotearoa Presidential Address

Abstract

Libraries should always be asking themselves the question of what business they are in, and in times of increasing pressure and threatened funding it becomes particularly important to redefine our core business. But there is a more pressing reason than this and it is the enormous impact which the increase in electronic information has on the way we work. At the CAUSE conference (on Information Resources Management) held in Melbourne in July, one speaker predicted that by 1998, 80 percent of the world's information would be electronic and 50 percent would be only electronic. Can we expect that this change will merely alter the types of products we deliver or does it fundamentally change our business? To answer this we need to be totally clear about what business we are in.