found themselves in the odd position of being able to read century-old journal articles—the archived originals—yet unable to read their own manuscripts written with obsolete word-processing software or stored on an obsolete storage medium. The management and preservation of information from short-lived magnetic recording media to ensure future accessibility has not yet been comprehensively addressed. Other issues include potential intellectual distortions resulting from the fact that only relatively recent materials (e.g., journal articles) are available online, and the need for universities to carefully manage heightened demand for access to some paper collections stimulated by electronic access.

Scholarship is still characterized and constrained by the publication of research findings, though this system is fast getting competition as a result of new information technologies (Odlyzko, 2000). The resulting confusion has not yet been resolved: traditional scholarly publication, through established (and extraordinarily costly) journals characterized by peer review, is being challenged by less formal Net-based communication that links scholars essentially instantaneously. The central challenge will be to preserve the benefits of the old system, in which the review process provides cohesion to a given field, while taking advantage of the speed and ease of access promised by new media.

But here too, the technology is evolving. For example, web sites are increasingly serving as portals to integrate material of value to particular scholarly pursuits.¹⁹ Ultimately, the most profound changes will involve software agents (Bradshaw, 1997), though such developments lie some years down the road.

The business environment of academic publishing is also an important factor. Publishers have consolidated and sought to create a business model in which online access to journals will drive profits, but they are faced with several high-profile efforts to expand free online access (Vaidhyanathan, 2001). A coalition of research libraries, universities, and other organizations known as the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is one group seeking to develop common approaches (www.arl.org/sparc).

Meanwhile, our capacity to reproduce and distribute digital information with perfect accuracy at essentially zero cost has shaken the very foundations of copyright and patent law, and it promises to affect notions of intellectual-property ownership