For example, Timothy Jewell's analysis confirms that data being collected about electronic resources expenditures show that most ARL libraries are spending a relatively small portion of their budget on electronic resources. Although this portion is increasing rapidly, the change is not consistent from year to year nor from member library to member library. The challenge, then, is not in describing any single change, but rather to develop quantifiable trend analysis in multiple institutions that can be executed from year to year in a consistent way. There is an often unarticulated assumption that change in libraries is moving in one direction. However, data from ARL libraries indicate thus far that change seems to be happening in rather haphazard and chaotic ways, both within individual libraries and across institutions.
Some leaders suggest that it is the rate of change creating confusion rather than change itself.
More recently, libraries have begun to provide either gateway or direct access to vendor and publisher full-text databases of journal articles and monographs. Libraries are also integrating access to various electronic information resources through a WWW interface, making it possible for the traditional library OPACs to link to various full-text resources. It has been impossible to provide consistent, quantitative indicators of such trends because of the rapidity of the changes and because they are, by their nature, not comparable to previous measures. Certainly, this environment is not conducive to identifying consistent measures among 121 research libraries. Most libraries are aware of the need to measure not only the use of their resources, but also the effectiveness of their library services.