The intent of the Millennium issue is to provide a forum for assessment of where we have been and where we are going. Acting as the public's trustworthy agent has been the historical role of librarians. Atkinson identifies the public's trust as an essential validator of libraries in the new Millennium. On the other hand, lack of trust motivates Lynch's observations. The Web world lacks social conventions for indexing markup, which permits struggles between those who would index the Web and those whose financial interest is in attracting the attention of the Web community.
Information tends to define community.
At a finer level, Amitay speculates about the use of language on the Web. The Web may be one large corpus of text, but she suggests that communities will express themselves by the conventions used for writing hypertext. It may be that new information technologies will spawn new communities. Hawkins is concerned with the relationship between the information science community and the library community, especially in terms of the recent initiatives to reassert the information technology aspect of information science. Information technology is also an important aspect of the discussion of Oluic-Vukovic, who attempts to shift the discussion to knowledge processing on the technical side and user demands on the other.