Online is catching up with books. The WorldWide Web is growing at 20-40 percent per month. Because the United States is a very distributed country with only 69 people per square mile and almost 3,500 institutions of higher education, electronic access to information is particularly important here. Information has large economies of scale. At the Naval Research Lab, the average scientist saves two hours per week by using online information.
Information is critical to all business, research, and education activities.
An input of a small amount of federal dollars could make a big difference in creating the electronic library. Reference Services Recent activity on The FirstSearch Service includes reaching for the first time milestones of more than 50,000 searches per day and 1,000,000 searches in the month of September. About half of the searches now are done under subscription accounts, while the other half are per-search accounts. Because of the reference development emphasis on FirstSearch 3.0 and switching from a mainframe to a distributed RISC system, fewer databases were added recently. The release of Guidon 3.0 in November of 1994 will include color and half-tone support, the ability to start FirstSearch from within the program, letters to the publisher, and communications with advertisers and suppliers.