Abstract
A combination of new developments in the technologies of computer storage, data transmission, and image display provides a wide range of powerful and attractive telecommunications-based information services that are widely promoted as a force for the revolutionization of institutional and individual practices in an information-oriented society. Although the magnitude and universality of the impact of these innovations has been well argued, their short-term effect on research libraries is more likely to be a substantial enhancement of these libraries' capacity to meet established patterns of need, rather than a fundamental alteration of the services which they provide. The new technology is typically most advantageous in services involving a high volume of standardized, short messages to homogeneous user-groups. But utilization of the resources of research libraries is characterized by the interpretation of complex and often implicit information-structures by a variety of small user-clienteles with individualized orientations and highly specific objectives.