Students without such access to local public or academic libraries have traditionally had to rely on the telephone and the postal or courier system for their information needs. Locating and ordering books over the telephone is time-consuming, and delivery is even more so. The immediate effect of the new technologies seems to be to support these programs rather than supplant them. For the most part, technologies such as fax, e-mail and the World Wide Web have merely decreased the time it takes to find and retrieve resources, and have done little to increase the actual availability of resources. Despite much talk about full-text databases and digital libraries, only a small percentage of library materials are available in their entirety in electronic form.
Technology does have positive applications for library services for distance learners.
Electronic documents can be transmitted quickly by fax, e-mail, ftp and the World Wide Web. In addition to the old difficulties of understanding subject headings, bibliographic citations and classification schemes, there are new difficulties of configuring one's modem to connect to the library and downloading information to disk. Many librarians risk finding themselves acting more as technology tutors and trouble-shooters than as reference, research and library experts. There is also the pressing problem of teaching students who use the World Wide Web as their library to evaluate information critically and to separate the wheat from the chaff. Another pitfall of technology is the confusion it brings to the arena of copyright.