Introduction
There has long been a concerted effort to revolutionise the "paper office" by minimising printing and the use of electronic apparatus to automate and complete administrative tasks, such as scanning, filing documents, sending messaging and almost instantly disseminating memos. More recently, the introduction of cloud computing, where document are stored online and can be shared within a group and edited by authorised users without even recourse to an installed "word processor" is another step towards a "paperless office" (by Google, Microsoft and others). In contrast to these attempts, the information environment will require far more advances and developments to compete with a digital office. There will be more chances of a paperless office than a paperless global information environment. Manuscripts and Rare book resources in the information environment are more likely to be digitised and used digitally for the sake of preserving the original documents, whilst contemporary publishers are introducing new publications both in print and digitally. Sometimes journal subscribers can access newly published articles electronically before they receive their printed issues. Despite this reading from prints remain popular and preferred amongst readers. So, certainly the notion of a paperless global information environment is not quite a reality yet. More particularly if global is interpreted as worldwide, then the developing countries have a long way to invest in digitising their material. To facilitate languages other than English, the developments of Unicode fonts are still far from adequate to display and retrieve key words in non-standard Latin characters.
