Digital Shift or Digital Drift? Dilemmas of Managing Digital Library Resources in North American Universities

TL;DRAbstract

Many IT specialists take for granted the shift from paper to electronic documents as part of a digital revolution. National indicators of the growth of network usage support shifts to digital documents such as exponential increases in the number of Internet hosts, the number of electronic mail addresses and the number of World Wide Web sites. However, in our empirical studies we have found that academic administrators base their decisions on local indicators of demand such as the number of people who depend upon World Wide Web for their work, the demand for electronic mail accounts and number of information retrieval requests from bibliographic databases. Because university budgets are flat relative to inflation and the university management of information resources is dispersed at many levels, they are investing in a way that indicates a drift toward use of digital materials. Can whole industries drift into major IS investments without coherent strategies? Such a pattern is anathema i

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