Form 15 (3/31/86) NSF PROJECT IST-850 5411 EXPERIMENTS ON THE COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF INFORMATION SEEKING AND INFORMATION RETRIEVING USER QUESTIONS FOR ONLINE SEARCHES QUESTION NUMBER: 038 A1. BRIEF TITLE: Impact of new electronic technology in the future of major technical reference libraries A2. QUESTION STATEMENT: I serve as the Chairman of the Library Board for the Engineering Societies library in the United Engineering Center in New York City.The library is under considerable attack by the supporting engineering societies (ASME, AIChE, IEEE, ASCE, AIME) for not doing the exciting, glamorous new electronic things which they feel libraries should. We have a financial crisis on day to day operation and are restricted because of this. However, we are planning to have a capital gifts fund drive to get endowment to buy a computer, equipment, and whatever technological advances are deemed appropriate. We need guidance on what the direction is in the future of document acquisition, cataloging, storing, and information dissemenation. This covers the items like: (1) direct delivery by optical scanning and digitizing of source material for direct transmission over phone lines or by satellite, (2) use of CD-ROMS for information storage - how to transmit to user, who puts information on the CD; (3) justification of computer use for card catalogs information storage; (4) disappearance of traditional role of a reference library this size and what will replace it ($1.3 million/year budget, ~1.1 million pages photocopied/year, non-profit organization). TYPE OF SEARCH REQUESTED B. A precise or a broad search: Broad C. Research application: Other D. Retrieve articles in English only or any language: English E. Years to be searched: Last 5 years F. DIALOG databases suggested: ERIC, CA, INSPEC Š