ABSTRACT
Last year at a Summit of World Library Leaders held by the New York Public Library, 50 representatives of some of the largest libraries in the world met to discuss global library strategies for the 21st century. As one might expect, talk quickly turned to the challenges and opportunities provided by rapidly changing electronic technologies. In the course of the meeting one of the participants described the struggle of his library to help users gain better access to the now more than 36 million Web sites available worldwide (a number that is said to double every three months). He described the problem of getting hundreds, sometimes thousands, of “hits” when an individual tries to do even a simple search and talked about the need for libraries to apply knowledge classification schemes to electronic information. After he spoke, other members of the group reported dealing with the same problem and talked about their attempts to identify and classify databases that are especially helpful. Each of us, it seemed, was struggling with the same problem and each library was duplicating the efforts of every other. It was a familiar problem.
