Introduction

This special, thematic volume focuses on Electronic Resources and Services. Clearly, electronic technologies have produced revolutionary changes in the daily activities of science librarians. However, the fundamental role of librarians remains the same: to collect source materials, organize those materials, and provide effective and efficient access to those materials. Electronic technologies provide librarians with new mechanisms and tools to accomplish these traditional functions in a distributed and virtual environment. Electronic resources and services emphasize the library as function, in addition to place. The articles in this volume have been selected to represent various facets of these new technologies. The articles can generally be divided between the areas of electronic services and resources. Several of the papers discuss the relationship between these two areas.