Conclusion
To conclude I think paperless applications will flourish. I do not think that applications that are paperless necessarily flows into a completely paperless library. People are used to the paper object and so they print it off. I think that technological change will get easier facilitated by the technology itself. Blogs and forums and online communities help.
But at the same time there are challenges to the paperless global environment. If you’re rich you upgrade your facilities as fast as your IT department can encourage you to. If you’re poor you have no choice and are excluded. So if you’re rich and implement these changes people don’t use them because change is scary and unfamiliar and even unnecessary. If you can have the paper version you will. The glimmer of light is convincing people that technologies that deliver articles quickly and then you can still print them off are useful. Perhaps in the future the hybrid library will die a death and be taken over by the digital but at the moment I think there is a case for promoting technology where it is useful and letting users drive this change.
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