The Phase I renovations of Sterling Memorial Library recognized this fundamental continuity in libraries. These first renovations of Sterling focused on ensuring that the physical fabric of our magnificent building would accommodate readers and books as well in the future as it had in the past. In the mid-1990s, just as Sterling was being renovated for its traditional and enduring functions, a digitally based revolution in scholarly communication was making itself felt everywhere in higher education. The availability of many information resources at the scholar's and student's desktop brings entirely new dimensions to the traditional effort of libraries to provide convenient access to and communal ownership of information. Increasingly it is no longer necessary to go physically to the library to use its resources.
Readers have almost no sense of sharing anything with anybody else in the digital library.
Indeed, the networked desktop computer has practically speaking become an immensely powerful private library for its user. Not surprisingly, readers have welcomed a change that so strongly favors them. The rapid growth in the Yale library's spending on electronic resources responds to strong reader demand. What makes this change fundamental for the library, as well as for the reader, is that the library rarely owns the online resources its readers use. In the traditional world of print, the library over time built a huge capital resource of information that has enduring value for the university community.