The good news is that additional, different means for providing library service are becoming available in a manner unprecedented since the nineteenth century. The challenge for all concerned with libraries, is to determine how, whether, and when these new means should be used. Libraries exist for the benefit of the mind, but they have serious practical problems coping with the acquisition, storage and handling of the documents and records with which they deal.
Major constraints arise from the technology used as a means for providing service.
Any change in technology that would have a significant effect on the methods available for acquisition, storage, delivery, or searching procedures could have important consequences for library service. Consequently a continuing quest for technological improvement has been and should continue to be important. Those responsible for providing library service have been more or less conscious of the nature of the underlying problems to be solved and some of the more gifted and farsighted groped towards radical solutions based on a deep understanding of the nature of the problems. The key elements of the probable form of the electronic library of the twenty-first century were being glimpsed, albeit imperfectly, by the early 1930s by perceptive thinkers. More recently visions of the library of the future have been associated with speculation on the demise of the book, the supposed obsolescence of librarians, and other questionable rhetoric.