Author Description

The OCLC Environmental Scan is a report to the OCLC membership. It seeks to serve as a tour guide and to discern patterns in the landscape that chaos and order inhabit together. The purpose of the report is to identify and describe issues and trends that are impacting and will impact OCLC, libraries, museums, archives and other allied organizations, positively and negatively. The scope of the report is the social, political, economic and technological spheres in which all these organizations and their communities of users operate. It attempts to identify the main patterns in the information landscape and suggest some implications for its future.