ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the state of the art in new information technology. The political economy of the new information technology is such as to maintain rather than replace older modes of delivering systematic information in hard-copy form. In the publishing industry, electronic databases were initially seen in a unilinear economic fashion-that is, as a product transferred from seller to buyer-and as a mechanism for moving beyond hard copy to diskette or cassette rendering of basic information. Social scientific information systems will change traditional hierarchical arrangements within academic culture. Demographers work with population sizes and shifts, political scientists work with voting patterns, sociologists with stratification networks, and, of course, economists have the monetary system as a touchstone to guide them. Innovation in databased technology has been so rapid that in many areas informational needs have not caught up. In many fields of scholarship, traditional indexing and abstracting services may be quite ample to meet current needs.
