It is difficult to know how much real collaboration is actually taking place. It is very difficult to actually quantify the percentages of the number of projects in which people are collaborating in an interactive sense and those in which they are 'collaborating' in the sense that they are merely working alongside each other. This was only one thread that emerged from a number of papers about perceptional and conceptual issues that led to debates about the relationship of theory to practice. Today there is a cultural shift in the digital environment. We have now moved from those debates focusing upon our ability to use digitised information to those that are centred upon how we do use it.
Many people use digital sources to automate current systems based upon print sources.
Digital information is often not used innovatively to take knowledge further. Other 'hot' topics were based upon intellectual property rights, discussion about the divide between electronic libraries and hybrid libraries, the design and architecture of interfaces. There was a great deal of concern amongst US speakers and delegates about the recent EU Database Directive. Discussion of this led to long exchanges about the possibility of global change research being badly effected if there are too many different rules from too many different countries. It seemed to me that there was some misinformation among delegates in relation to UK copyright laws and Crown Copyright.