The prospect is exciting, but it contains some scary features. One of these features is that a truly collaborative work, particularly a work in progress, blurs the concept of authorship and makes it difficult to judge the significance of individual contributions. Now, we manage information mostly by author. We will have to find another way. Another disquieting feature of the new environment is that the electronic medium is evolving as fast as the scholarly discourse being carried out in it.
All fields go through periods of stagnation.
So long as the discourse is lively, or at least animate, scholars and librarians who serve them will port it from system to system. For a long time now, librarians have been moving cautiously towards greater and greater cooperation. The progress has been slow, because the large institutional investments in libraries have made us proprietary. The electronic medium requires that we speed up the move towards collaborative action. Now, we need to decide how we will preserve electronic information resources.