Access Versus Holdings: The Paradox of the Internet

Abstract

It is the purpose of this paper to argue that librarians have been blinded to its basic flaws by the gaudiness of the Internet and that we are confusing sources and resources. The Internet shows none of the features required for scholarly communication and whether or not we believe this will change, we should be developing models which offer electronic services as a viable and reliable resource.

Although the Internet is of some age in the dog years which pass for computing time, the World Wide Web is relatively new, with the first web browser dating only from 1994. In the four years after that it achieved a phenomenal acceptance, in what Paul Evan Peters called the largest mass migration in human history. It was adopted by fifty million users in fifty months. Radio took 38 years to gain such an audience and television some thirteen years. Currently it has some seventy million users. And yet it lacks the important elements of sustainability necessary for scholarship:

• Permanence

• Availability

• Accessibility

One of the unremarked triumphs of librarianship in the last forty years is that we have created a system which allows the researcher reliably and persistently to identify and retrieve any document published anywhere in the world. This has been a long term project which is a bedrock for scholarship. The Web, on the other hand, is in fact a four year old experiment, not a robust service. Not for nothing is it called the World Wide Wait.