This chapter was written in 1997. It is part of the exercise covering the years 1939 to 2005 which I titled “Peace Process” and which is deposited in the Boole Library in UCC. Looking back from the perspective of today, I have decided to let the chapters stand as witness to concerns which were of great interest to me then and continue to be so.

I understand how many people working in the European Commission who appreciated the political dynamism and leadership of Jacques Delors have made their own the concept of “masse critique”.

I see the idea of “critical mass” as the drive to accumulate that core of political agreement and consensus, supported by a well-prepared package of proposals and essential legislation, which will ensure that the momentum towards achieving a specific objective becomes unstoppable. Within the Commission I believe that 1999 was the year in which the electronic library achieved critical mass.

Widespread access to and use of an electronic library, or library without walls, is an important building block in progress towards the global information society. That is, the network of telecommunications and computers which most of the developed world’s business and political leaders believe will define a specific period of extraordinary economic and social progress, in the same way as the arrival of the internal combustion engine did a century ago.

The central importance of the library application in the world of electronic information is that it is of use to people of all ages and interests. It has the benefit of carrying with it many of the positive features of the library tradition, a tradition of public service in which the guiding values are cultural, intellectual and professional integrity.

In individual libraries the concept of the electronic library was limited initially to the computerisation of collection management, with catalogue access and library information being made available to users through reading-room terminals. As more and more libraries introduced such online systems, and communication between them became easier through the internet’s global network, the same reading-room terminals could offer access to the catalogues of other libraries, thus opening up new research possibilities.

More recently, as libraries began to acquire their catalogue data in electronic form directly from publishers and agencies, and as the availability in electronic form of the full text of many books and periodicals became the norm, rather than the exception, the electronic library offered access not just to catalogue entries but to all or part of the works identified in a timescale much closer to the date of publication than would be possible with print or paper collections.

Among both librarians and readers there had been for a long time considerable scepticism about and resistance to the electronic library concept. The fallibility of computer systems and the difficulties and unfriendliness of terminal use led many to believe that the new information society approach would never catch on.

Many were also convinced that, rather than promoting more quality research, the information society would drown everyone in more information than they could handle, offering unrealistic, unsorted reading lists and ending the possibility of browsing through open stacks of real books – a type of access that has proved itself in promoting those inter-disciplinary contacts which were so often at the heart of original research.

The limited nature of early electronic and multimedia publishing, and the problems of scanning historic collections into an accessible electronic format, also suggested to many that electronic publishing would never challenge print and the book. Many library professionals and others also believed that the absence of agreed international standards for electronic transfer, together with the difficulty of applying global market considerations to concepts such as copyright and intellectual property, would prevent the emergence of a viable world of electronic publishing for a long time.

I had shared most of these concerns. I was convinced however that the core technology had proved itself and that the ease with which children could use computers and electronic media with virtually no instruction showed that, although the transition to the information society might take longer than some people thought, it was certainly unstoppable.

Given my long-established attachment to the highest academic standards, and to the importance of the confrontation between readers and primary texts, I was nevertheless equally convinced that ways would be found of handling the volume and diversity of electronic information in a manner that would be advantageous to both scholarship and general education. My view was that this mining of added value from “the library without walls” would come though the development of new computer search tools and researching techniques and through the mobilising of highly educated and skilled information specialists. Such “electronic librarians” would work in business, industry, public institutions, universities and research centres alongside the users, whether they be managers, administrators, politicians, scientists or artists. They would be among the categories of new professional created by the computer – and governments and the private sector would have to find ways of paying for this human capital.

In 1999 it was still clear that the information society vision was not for the immediate day. But, within the world of the European Commission – which had been the arena for my professional and, since 1993, librarian career – I was excited to see falling into place an internal network of sufficient reliability and user-friendliness to support electronic library access. My team had already demonstrated how an interactive library function could offer every official with a terminal on their desk access to their library services.

The further pieces in the jigsaw that convinced me that critical mass had been achieved in the Commission’s move towards the establishment of its electronic library were the growing availability to Commission users of electronic texts of all kinds and evidence that, as the importation of electronic data reduced the burden of catalogue and other traditional tasks on the Commission’s professional library staff, some would quickly prove their capacity as indispensable “electronic librarians”.

Read more: 2000 – A Collogue Proposal (Fiction)