Proceedings of the International Symposium, Science & Engineering Libraries for the 21st Century, Leuven, October 2-4, 2002, Arenbergkasteel, Leuven (Heverlee)

Book excerpt: The digital revolution of the last decades of the 20th century had a vast impact on scientific, and other libraries worldwide. Modern technology has made the access to information so much easier and faster, and the Internet sometimes gives its users the false impression that all information can be obtained without any human intervention. If this were true, libraries would be reduced from intellectual laboratories to museums, where visitors only come to look at those strange paper format precursors of the digital information carriers. Even if such an extreme futuristic view cannot be completely excluded, it is still very far away. In the meantime, libraries and librarians continue to play an important role, especially in the digital environment where the traditional skills of librarians have found a new importance and new applications. Their devotion to the preservation of historically significant documents may counterbalance the tendency of the Internet to become a dull collection of knowledge facts and to forget the logical processes through which this knowledge was obtained. The long-established experience of librarians as organizers of information and as facilitators of the access to this organised knowledge collection has already proven to be of immeasurable value for the use of all kinds of digital information sources.