Research libraries and electronic scholarly journals: Challenges or opportunities?

The advent of academic electronic journals is examined here with special focus on the implications for librarians, In order to approach this question, the economic context of present academic journals is reviewed and the implications of the savings made possible by electronic publishing are drawn out, A number of important questions relating to the future of librarianship in this context are then broached and ways of thinking about possible scenarios are derived from a study of the lessons that can be drawn from the UnCover project of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries. Some of the peculiarities of the Canadian situation are alluded to in this perspective in the conclusion.