Introduction

The advent of electronic information has served to intensify collection managers’ allegiances with both of these traditional divisions because electronic resources create opportunities and challenges for library users and professionals alike. Katrina Stierholz, Government Documents Librarian at St. Louis University, examines the history of electronic resources in documents collections. She focuses on the pitfalls associated with distributing government information in electronic formats while acknowledging those formats’ great potentials. Consideration of multiple factors is also at the heart of Tim Collins and Beth Howell’s piece on assessing the value of journals in an environment characterized by many different access and delivery mechanisms. From their vantage point at EBSCO Publishing, they propose a way of incorporating data on indexing, commercial document delivery, and paper subscriptions into a factor which would assist librarians in selection decisions.