ABSTRACT
For most of the history of library management there has been little pressing need for much revision of basic principles, with our organizations continuing to be influenced by the development of military management. With global management a developing discipline today it is a sobering thought that the city state of Venice in the 1400s was already involved in the provision of global finance, and presumably developed their own way of dealing with the distributed organizations for which they provided funds. American baseball teams of the mid-19th century appear to have been the first to specifically use the term player-manager, although all primitive or simple organizations throughout the history of management inevitably demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of the idea. Boundaryless organizations are perhaps the organisational form for the library of the future, and it has already been attempted in a crude shape. Looking at the array of electronic developments in libraries, the boundaryless organisation is not only a potential structure.
