Acceso usuarios
Joachim Schöpfel
This article discuses various aspects of the history of libraries, thanks to their adaptabilbity, diversity and varability as well as their future viewed from the past due to: the rapid grown of content, development of new services incresingly oriented to the user, impressive technologgical changes, creation of new job profiles, virtualization of their user communities, content prodution and globalitation. It also shows the exostence of several futures based on a SWOT analysis and changes in key functions such as acquisitions, gateways to information and its preservation, some positive and negative points that depend largely on the academic institutions they serve, management of new content (in particular the impact of the Internet, the preservation heritage material and data management), its new involvement in th information value chain (such as hosting and management repositories, knowledge management, evaluation of research and test and data miniing) among others. It concludes with several importan questions that need to be addressed to reach some conclusions of their possible future.
