However, finding and reading material is only one part of the exercise. By this means she can personally enrich the work on her project but also acquire the vital transferable communication and international group-work skills. This suggests that the electronic library no longer needs to be a peripheral activity, but is a central resource for learning law. It is also very different from a traditional library in making searching easier and in providing an ease of browsing because of the availability of hypertext tools. Multimedia can enhance presentations with the aid of voices, images, animated diagrams and video-clips.
Electronic information is also easier to deliver to large numbers of people.
There are no queues and no need for readers and librarians to travel to inaccessible stacks, or for readers to physically travel to a library. If properly resourced and managed, it has the potential for providing just the resource which will convert the law student from being a passive recipient of basic information from set texts into an independent researcher who appreciates the quality of group work. More significantly, it will enable law students both to promote and fit into a changing legal culture which relies increasingly on information technology. Inevitably there are problems with this starry eyed vision. Perhaps the most important one is cost.