ABSTRACT
Academics now have access to an increasingly wide range of IT-assisted information systems that they can use to support information seeking in research. The extent and variety of access to online IT-assisted information systems have both increased radically with the advent of the World Wide Web. A measure of the diversity of these systems is indicated by the links to a range of library catalogs, bibliographic databases, directory services and archive services provided by the U.K. National Information Services and Systems (NISS) gateway (https://www.niss.ac.uk/datahosts" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://www.niss.ac.uk/datahosts). In March 1997, 21 datahosts that required registration were available, as were 14 unrestricted access datahosts. Figure 15.1 indicates the range of available datahosts.
