As anyone who's explored the Internet knows, millisecond access
to terabytes of information can be more of a problem than an
opportunity. Intellectual property owners of many kinds, eager
to tap into the Internet as an inexpensive distribution channel,
are seeking ways to make libraries of information available.
These libraries can be "virtual," in the sense that
they exist only as a collection of pointers to documents, rather
than a physical collection. Thus, multiple "card catalogs"
and other information navigation tools, potentially reflecting
many purposes and points of view, can exist in parallel.
Copyright, performance and maintenance problems call for a
distributed library model. Formatting and conversion obstacles
remain for both documents and "meta-information," although
emerging commercial products and standards claim to solve the
major problems.
Librarians, publishers and electronic forums are undergoing
paradigm shifts as their domains increasingly overlap. Publishers
find themselves acting like librarians as they build electronic
collections of documents; librarians are beginning to behave
more like publishers by distributing documents and "packaging"
information; electronic forums such as Usenet and CompuServe
are becoming social information search and retrieval tools in
their own right.
The World-Wide Web and related emerging standards for "Uniform
Resource Information," combined with databases and search
engine-based information "agents," hold great promise
for construction of virtual libraries. Important issues of maintainability
and scalability continue to beg the question of information structures.
Opinion-based navigation and organic models may address these
issues.