Evolution of the Goals of the Project

An interesting thing happened during the WWW phase of the Project. It became clear that the Project could do more than facilitate access to electronic resources of scholarly societies. It could also play the role of advocate in several areas, by encouraging, for example:

• societies to set up Internet resources [aided by extensively publicizing the existence of the Project]

• societies to learn from and perhaps co-operate with one another [aided by providing subject guides that group society resources by discipline, and also providing essays on the role of scholarly societies in the flow of information]

• maintainers of society Internet resources to strive to meet or surpass a basic level of richness and organization in their resources [aided by making the guidelines readily available]

• societies to experiment with Internet provision of newsletters and journals [aided by setting up an area devoted to full-text archives]

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