The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery. It was the basic
metaphor with which the cycle of civilisation began, the step from the dark into
the light of mind. The hand that hardened the clay tablets by baking like bricks
created the library. Libraries have undergone a major change in modern times.
They have been experiencing technological revolution that goes welt beyond
anything that has existed since the invention of printing. Not surprisingly, the
digital library with all that portends for the future of the book, but also with
all that it implies for the kinds of information that will be collected and
disseminated, will necessarily preoccupy those responsible for libraries in the
new millennium. Every person who uses digital libraries will also expect to have
access to the internet and the electronic library will look like any other
Internet sources. Publishing --the paradigm-is in front line of exposure to
change under the impact of information revolution. Some activities traditionally
associated with publishing and other traditionally associated with libraries are
being disentangled and recombined. The new configurations have wide implications
for beyond the boundaries of the academic world in which many of them originate.
Electronic mail and electronic publishing are only two of the more obvious
application of the combination of computing and tale-communications which we
describe as information technology'. The buzzword of the 1980's is 'end user'.
The explosion of home computer market has resulted in an expanding population of
millions who are comfortable at a computer terminal and in the last twenty years
a number of databases and online services and cost to the nature of reading
public itself is now up for re-examination. If information has become the new
kind of capital, the significance of intellectual property is fundamentally
changed. Much attention is now devoted to the information of social life: we are
told that we are entering an information age. that a new mode of information
predominates, that we have moved into a global information economy. The general
criteria for the development of information societies are clearly beginning to
emerge. Many dreamers believe that networking and the Internet are just vanguard
of technologies that will transform libraries into electronic libraries. While
LANs (Local Area networks) and the Internet may be he wave of the future, the
fact Is that OPAC(Online Public- Access Catalogue) and the electronic
circulation are the real foundations of the 'library without wall '. It is
obvious that libraries being built today do not resemble those marble
sanctuaries constructed in the early twentieth century. This is a work that
shows how libraries have been transformed from 'refuges' from the external world
, to places that reflect the social and intellectual values of specific
societies.