Building a digital library for the health sciences: information space complementing information place.

In 1990, the University of California, San Francisco, dedicated a new library to serve the faculty, staff, and students and to meet their academic information needs for several decades to come. Major environmental changes present new and additional information management challenges, which can effectively be handled only through the widespread use of computing and computing technologies. Over the next five years, a three-pronged strategy will be followed. We are refining the current physical, paper-based library through the continuous application of technology for modernization and functional improvement. At the same time, we have begun the planning, design, and implementation of a "free-standing" Digital Library of the Health Sciences, focusing on the innovative application of technology. To ensure complementarity and product integrity where the two libraries interface, we will look to technology to transform these separate entities into an eventual, integral whole.