Portals to the Past & to the Future

The dawning of the digital age has raised the question of the role libraries can expect to play in the future. Are they educational and cultural institutions -- or service centres? With the help of their varied media collections, their technological infrastructure and their expertise in information management, libraries will assuredly rise to meet the challenges of this balancing act. This third revised and updated English edition of "Portals to the Past and to the Future" by Jurgen Seefeldt and Ludger Syre is a precise state-of-the art report on current German librarianship. Lavishly illustrated, the book uses selected examples to show the outstanding results nation-wide co-operation has achieved whilst at the same time portraying the history and the different types of German libraries. The reader will gain a revealing insight into both the cultural and educational policy underlying German library structure and the organisation of professional training in librarianship. This book has been translated not only into English but also into Arabic, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Turkish and has since become the standard work on libraries and librarianship in Germany, providing trainee librarians and non-librarians alike with a clear and easy-to-follow picture of the way libraries were able to co-operate in the aftermath of the Second World War to create a flexible and effective decentralised library network more than a match for the challenges of the third millennium.