We are using e-mail and electronic bulletin boards. We are creating databases and sending them out to our friends and colleagues. For 22 years, I have been working on a study of the extant judicial opinions of the twelfth century. The Vatican Press will publish the Regesta decretalium seculi duodecimi . By the time I finish the work, given the distractions I've let myself in for this past decade, I wonder whether I will bother to publish it in the traditional way.
Traditional publication is, like a pedigree, an indicator of quality.
We think of libraries as organized repositories of knowledge, but, as the acid paper crisis shows, their greatest contribution to teaching and research may be as preservers of knowledge. Yet, ironically, the electronic revolution is putting libraries and librarians, as they come on line, out of the loop. The age of the paper book and journal is far from over and we will yet fill many libraries before it is, but much of the information we produce and use is never getting into the libraries and when it does librarians have no idea what part of the whole they have got their hands on. This is bound to affect scholarship. Modern standards of scholarship rely on the assumption that scholars should be able, through their libraries or through bibliographic services, to read all of the relevant literature.