Making Sense of New Technology and New Legislation
Joseph William Ford · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1984
Telecommunications may well be the key technical and economic issue of the 1980s for libraries. No other resource at our disposal challenges us so much to make good decisions, and no other issue will reward our efforts if we do well, nor punish us so much if we fail to act. The telecommunications resources we use have allowed us to develop much of the library data processing we use and rely on. Yet, in another sense, much of the telecommunications plant, or facilities that we use, are the traditional copper wires of limited capacity but nearly unlimited distribution. Typically, libraries have leased this capacity and created private networks that link us together, to our branch locations, and to the bibliographic utilities. Library telecommunications also includes the use of the value-added packet-switching networks such as Telenet (General Telephone Electronics), Uninet (United Telecom Communications), and Tymnet (Tymshare Inc.), for dialing into information services such as Dialog and Bibliographic Retrieval Services, and to a lesser extent into OCLC or between individual libraries or branch locations.