In history, however, concern about permanency or archival access may outweigh the virtues of distributed access. Electronic texts are currently most attractive where users are many and dispersed, or where searching and other kinds of text processing capabilities are critical to a research project. Electronic reserve and the virtual classroom are currently limited by copyright to the reproduction of small segments of monographs. Initial publisher offerings of electronic monographs largely reproduce print. Historical statistics won' t become attractive as digital offerings until the data is marked up for down loading and reanalysis by standard statistical software.
Many ambitious projects are underway to make significant primary sources available over the web.
The history liaison welcomes suggestions for improvement and is willing to add links to resources being used in connection with specific courses. Historians' greater reliance on monographs may explain this comparatively low total. Microform borrowing would almost certainly be higher if more collections were universally cataloged. To better serve historical researchers, libraries have to improve both the intellectual access and the lending policies that affect this important body of material. Emerging Choices Resource sharing initiatives Adoption of the Z39.50 standard by library systems vendors has made it possible for us to consider sharing our catalog with cooperating institutions.