Volume 15, Number 6 • June 1998

Round the clock, round the world — Delivering quality, affordable data 24 hours a day will take us into the future by Barbara Quint

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QUINT'S ONLINE column reports on the Southern California Online Users Group annual workshop, which broke all previous attendance records. Says the topic of the workshop was "Radical Redesign of Reference and Research," and common threads among speakers included the need for a new reference/research model that will scale with future needs, and the now-common standard of round-the-clock service availability. Suggests that print will become a secondary medium to digital data, primarily delivered over the Internet, and that information vendors will be forced to change pricing structures. Notes that librarians from public, corporate, and academic sectors have begun building Web sites around links to their own data and to other quality sites as a means of providing 24-hour services. Says vendors might consider creating new price-comparison services, or offering price guarantees, to compete with this new phenomenon.

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Microcomputer Abstracts, © 1998 Information Today, Inc.