Within CUNY at the present time, access to technology is often restricted to the early adopters who have been able to secure external funds for research projects. Making full use of both electronic information sources coordinated through libraries and Open Learning opportunities will require more wide spread access to technology for both faculty and students. As long as faculty rights to determine curriculum is respected and faculty participation is sought in making decisions about issues like class size, workload, and questions of ownership and compensation, union resistance to Open Learning seems unlikely. This section will define terms, survey what CUNY is doing now, and raise some issues that will need to be addressed. Briefly, onsite collections can be shared and enhanced through Interlibrary Loan, electronic document delivery, and electronic full-text databases, but they have not and will not disappear.
New technologies present new problems and opportunities for preservation.
Making resources accessible through cataloguing has been automated and centralized, but still offers new challenges in the age of Internet resources. CUNY libraries are fulfilling their mission with a mixture of traditional services enhanced by evolving new technologies. The section is based on a survey of CUNY libraries conducted by the committee, and on conversations with librarians, members of the teaching faculty, and students.