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Mieko, and all We have a team of four with a mixture of Library and IT skills and qualifications all dealing with library systems and development and that has been an enormous aid to the progress we have made with electronic resources. The latter are so central to what we all do now that you need to have a high level of appropriate skills either within the library structure (or in an IT department but with a mandate to spend time on library development). In our case the systems posts were created after a number of subject librarians took early retirement or voluntary redundancy about five years ago. That was hard to swallow at the time but seems right in retrospect. Equally I do not think we want to put Electronic resources in a separate box so that everyone else more or less ignores them and gets on with whatever they have always done with paper products. That means you have to have clear views of what is done by Systems/Electronic resource staff and what is done by subject librarians, cataloguers, acquisitions staff, etc. In our case selection and promotion of electronic resources are primarily the responsibility of subject librarians, but there is constant communication between subject librarians, periodicals librarian and systems support staff. E-journals, especially the big deals, are changing the way we allocate resources. Like most people, I imagine, we do not feel we have that sorted yet but what is necessary is a clear strategy and constant communication. I doubt if it can be done by allocating money to e-resources in isolation form paper. Stephen =================================== Stephen Drake Resource Management Librarian University of Ulster Shore Road Newtownabbey Co Antrim BT37 0QB United Kingdom TEL + 44 (0) 28 9036 8181 or 9036 8005 FAX + 44 (0) 28 9036 6819 E-MAIL [log in to unmask]