ABSTRACT
Some well-known digital prophets say that electronic information delivery already is eroding users’ awareness of the contexts in which information exists. According to these experts, the origins of data, how it was obtained, and its production costs are irrelevant to growing numbers of online users so long as they can access it as quickly, easily, and cheaply as possible. For libraries and librarians, some of the significant information providers, however, these concerns and contexts still matter a great deal. Provenance, providers, and cost form the crux of their work, as they always have. In fact, this contextual information is so important that it is hard to imagine from the
librarian’s vantage point how any serious information provider can ever discount its value.
