Modern librarianship has been shaped by many factors, socio-cultural, political, economic and demographic, but there is a strong case – although not necessarily a technologically deterministic one – for the assertion that technological change has been paramount in the post-war period. Specifically, information technology, in its various manifestations as ‘mechanisation’, ‘automation’, ‘IT’ and now ‘telematics’, has transformed, albeit in differing degrees, libraries across the sectors in Britain and Ireland. The application of computers to circulation and other library routines has been explored above, and the focus will now be upon the role of information technology in the craft of information retrieval. I will suggest that in no sphere of the library world has the process of so-called ‘informatisation’ – a useful if ugly term referring broadly to the adoption of computerised information systems – been more revolutionary than in reader services, and particularly in the facilitation of literature searching. But it may first be helpful to make a few general comments on the wider intellectual context of informatisation, and the manner in which the new IT ‘paradigm’ permeated library culture.

The author usually credited with coining the idea, although he never actually used the term ‘informatisation’, was the economist Fritz Machlup. In a classic work of 1962, Machlup propounded the startling claim that the United States of America was witnessing an unprecedented explosion of ‘knowledge production’, in higher education, in information and media services of many kinds, in the ‘information machine’ industries, and indeed throughout much of the economy.