Dear Friends, Thank you all very much in responding to email on the above subject. Ihad made certain assumptions that could be true in the year 2020.Under such circumstances, what could be the Shape of Academic andResearch Libraries? I did not touch upon the Public and NationalLibraries, as their functions are more of serving the citizens and ofarchival of national heritage. Some of you [1][2] have valid reasons to question such assumptionsespecially when it comes to India. Infrastructure like Electricity andReliable Internet connectivity could be major hurdles. You won'tbelieve that even in Delhi, the capital of India, there are regularpower cuts. Even in day of Govt. Control of power distribution thesituation was much better. Only problem was billing and their payment.With private companies, billing and payments is no problem, can behandled conveniently over Internet. But the power cuts are a routineand unscheduled. So lesson learned is that Privatization withoutcompetition is worse. But friends, hold a bit, lack of infrastructure won't affect thecoming shape of libraries in India. The Reason? Our Research andTeaching depends largely depends on what is published outside India.Even good Indian content is published outside India. So we have nochoice if much of it is available in electronic format in future. Iagree with some of you [2][5] that paper is more convenient mode ofreading. But then efforts to develop display gadgets that will givethe comfort of paper are on way and by 2020 could be a reality. So, Ithink, whether we are ready or not – content may only available inelectronic form [3][6] from developed countries. Economics ofpublishing may not favor print formats. The publishers will bedistributing the content, as done now, in various business models –Free, Fee Based, Pay-per-view etc. Only thing would be that confusionsaround copyrights etc would be cleared and taken care of by the year2020. Friends, training of the end-users will also be not a major problemthen. The future users are the now primary school children. You willappreciate how both their teachers and parents keen to teach themcomputers. Infact, if a middle class Indian family is buying a homecomputer today, it is for their children. I hope this generation ofusers may be well ahead of present day users. I am not painting a gloomy picture for future of Librarianship. I amonly assuming a "worst – case scenario". I know, I was told in mymatriculation math class, how to solve problem and find unknownquantity – 'Let the quantity be "X" !!!' and so on. So friends, under the given assumptions, what would be the librariesof year 2020 look like? References:1. http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/medlib/message/163 - Satish S Munnolli2. http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/medlib/message/164 - Varalakshmi3. http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/medlib/message/165 - Surinder Kumar4. http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/medlib/message/166 - Vasumathi Sriganesh5. http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/medlib/message/168 - Rama Reddy6. http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/medlib/message/167 - Prasanna --Sukhdev Singh, NIC.http://openmed.nic.inhttp://indmed.nic.in