This strength is one that we must nourish in every way that we can, and such nourishment is more and more difficult and more and more vital as our world changes and expands. RLG and the AMSC played a major role in implementing the AMC format, and a project to enter descriptions of government records into RLIN created a collaboration among seven state archives that further pushed the boundaries of the RLIN database. We remain concerned in all of our institutions with managing processing and cataloging, with the growing backlogs, with the continuing need for retrospective conversion in some of the major institutions, with preserving and providing access to our collections, and with promoting research use of our materials. But technology and telecommunications, particularly the developing digital technology, have shifted our attention from discussions of processing, cataloging, and interlibrary loan to the sharing of information, including full-text information, through the Internet. It is not that the other issues have gone away, indeed they are possibly more keenly urgent than ever before, but the digital environment has created new opportunities, new challenges, new choices in priorities, adding on to the old.
External forces shape the nature of our work as never before.
Technology gives us new tools for communication and work that are powerful in the best sense, constantly changing, difficult to manage, and enormously expensive. Our collections are no longer dominated solely by printed works and works on paper. The technology has insidiously come to reside in our stacks as well as control our working lives, making preservation and access even more labor-intensive, complex, and costly. In US institutions of whatever size or description, digitizing is on the agenda. These technological advances leave us with a host of new questions and challenges to resolve that are merely added to all those other issues that we faced with microfilming decades ago, and to the ongoing challenges of organizing, preserving, and providing access to our collections.