In recent years, computerized topical searches have made the card catalog obsolete and World Wide Web addresses have probably become more important that the Dewey Decimal system. Now, the Digital Library Initiative is opening new doors to researchers and students at UB, without expanding the stacks.

The University Library system is now nearly a year into its five-year Digital Library Initiative. That initiative, which will cost more than $6 million, will make UB's library vastly more efficient and place it among the top university libraries, technologically, in the country, according to von Wahlde. It will also bring the vast resources of the library and the Internet directly to the desktop computers of students and staff.

One of the stops along the World Wide Web is the University at Buffalo Library homepage. That page itself is the launching point for the new Library Web-a vast, organized view of UB's library holdings and related resources. "The Internet is mostly chaos," explained Loss Glazier, Lockwood Library's associate librarian, "but our library professionals try to comb through it to find what is relevant and use it to supplement our material." Glazier explained that the Library Web uses menus and "hypertext links," which are software tools that carry the reader from a highlighted word in one text to a more developed menu or site on that topic, to make the large amount of information easily manageable.

University Libraries is also directing more and more of its acquisition funding to acquiring electronic resources to supplement, and sometimes replace, printed volumes. With a keystroke, one can call up any entry from the Encyclopedia Brittanica, retrieve a detailed biography on any of more than 20,000 authors or read the latest edition of a major academic journal; all without leaving your office or dorm room. Shortly, even the 20-volume unabridged Oxford English Dictionary will be available online, explains Glazier.

The online journal selections come via a recent acquisition of 14 top academic journals through an electronic link to Johns Hopkins Press, according to Stephen Roberts, associate director of libraries. "This is significant because these are some of the finest journals in their respective fields," explained Roberts. Still, only a small percentage of the 23,000-plus journals the libraries currently receive are available electronically, concedes Roberts.

"This should grow rapidly, however. The advantages of electronic availability are immense," explained Roberts. One UB professor recently confessed to Roberts that he saw an article he wrote for a major journal online even before he received a printed copy. While the cost is still roughly the same as it would be for printed copies of these journals, Roberts expects that will not be the case for long. "Electronic media should become less expensive as it becomes more available," he explained. "Not to mention the shelf space and Xeroxing it saves."

Currently, you can access the Library Web through a library workstation or another campus PC that is directly-connected to the university network or through your own PC via a campus e-mail account. Soon, Roberts explained, an "authentication" process will be available so that members of the campus community can access the Library Web directly through commercial Internet access providers, such as America Online, then verify their student/faculty/staff status when they connect. "Many of the electronic acquisitions must be restricted only to students, faculty or staff, in accordance with our licensing agreements," explained Roberts.

So, what does all this technology mean to the future of books? "Books may become more of an historic artifact," predicts von Wahlde, "but it is, in itself, still good technology." More and more information will likely be distributed electronically in the future, she said, "But it's still much easier to curl up at the beach with a paperback than with a laptop."

One issue von Wahlde and Roberts both see emerging from the new technologies is an opportunity for academicians to regain control over their intellectual property and the publishing process itself. "Right now, most academics write because they need to be published; for their own careers and to contribute to their fields," von Wahlde said. "They are generally not paid for their works, but the publishers turn around and sell these journals to the university for pretty substantial sums of money."

All of this technology is being added within the constraints of diminishing state resources for UB, said von Wahlde. "Historically, we receive about three to five percent of the university's overall budget," she said. However, in the last two years, over a million dollars has been cut from the library's acquisitions funding, now down to under $4 million. The new student technology fee covers part of the cost, and redirecting funds from other areas covers others, von Wahlde explained.