Full text databases in biomedicine and document delivery

All the parts of the librarianship are now changing because of the new technologies. In particular, the document delivery is going to be deeply modified by the full-text bases. These bases can provide the complete text of books, congresses, articles in all the branches, included the sciences and the biomedicine, where they are becoming more and more numerous and specific. In medicine, they began to be used in the USA, ten years ago, and now, this wave is reaching Europe. Many journals are online or CD, chiefly those in experimental fields, where the publication delay is too long. These bases are very interesting for the end-user because of an easy, quick and friendly access. Moreover, they are available even when the library is closed. In the future, we can fear that they induce a strong decrease of our interloan and its revenues. It could be one of the major challenges of these next years.
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