ABSTRACT
It should be admitted that there is no unanimity of historical recounting or consensus of forecasting in the literature surveyed by this author. Contrary assessments are readily to be found in the several reference lists following each paper within this work. These include many that will disagree with the author’s opinions. Nonetheless, a scan of over 300 recent papers (including over 150 pertinent to this work, but outside the scope of the more narrowly defined literature of librarianship) that are cited throughout this volume prompts the following summary assessments that are intended to set the table for the longer reviews that follow. These assessments represent some of this author’s central theses, and are presented straightway in the time-management interests of busy readers who need to get to the main points first, and then can hash out any underlying issues and reasons later by reading items in the bibliographies that follow this and other papers in this work for themselves.
