Current problems of commercially funded information services at the 51st ASLIB annual conference

Abstract

The 2nd Session of the 51 st ASLIB annual conference (Lancaster, 20-23 September 1977) has dealt with the United Kingdom's information resources and their contribution to a national information system; the session was devoted to the questions of commercially funded services. The present survey is a brief account of the papers presented on commercially funded on-line retrieval services - past, present and future; long-term economics of on-line services and their relationship to conventionai publishers seen from the database producer's viewpoint; commercially funded services: an appraisal from the viewpoint of the smaller user; changing patterns of information use and supply.