Role of Electronic Media into Retrieval of Original Documents

Abstract

Since the mid 1960’s we are living in what has been called the “online age”. Thanks to a proliferation of online databases and to great developments in the technology of electronic communications, libraries have had access to multiple sources of information. Bibliographic searches may be performed on an enormous variety of databases available on different supports, and search strategies are more and more refined, but a bibliographic search, even though as exhaustive as possible, cannot be considered complete without the retrieval of the original document by end-user. Purpose of this work is to give an overview on the different possibilities offered by the information market on this subject, with particular emphasis upon new technologies provided by electronic media.