The center's activities include acquisition of digital collections, electronic publishing, digitizing of unique research materials, and providing access to digital collections located in other institutions. The SDRC is a resource for faculty and students who are interested in electronic publishing or who wish to explore issues related to electronic scholarly communication. The current automated on-line catalog system operated by the University Libraries and the Law Library will be replaced by a new system beginning fall 2000. When the new system is fully implemented, it will contain information about all of the 4 million volumes in the University of Iowa Libraries and the Law Library, will support 500 simultaneous users, and will run on a dedicated IBM 570 class system server. Most OPAC features are available to both in-library and remote users working on home or office computers.
Extensive indexes provide access to virtually any data field.
Traditionally, the strength of a library system has been based primarily on the number of volumes it holds. Because of the substantial, seemingly geometric growth in recorded information, and because of dwindling resources available to acquire this information, it is expected that an increasingly important measure of library effectiveness will be the staff's ability to provide timely access to material not held locally. Through these organizations, especially CIC, Iowa's students and faculty members have gained greatly increased access to materials held at other institutions. The next step in the evolution of the Virtual Electronic Library will be the capacity to request information resources directly from other CIC institutions. Publication Notice Page content was reviewed in June 2000.