A while ago in a posting cheerfully titled Thinking the unthinkable I mused on what might happen to our journal collections if we had to renew our subscriptions at the then prevailing exchange rate. Since then the NZ dollar has eased back a bit but we are by no means out of the woods and unless something unexpected happens there will be some difficult decisions made within the next few months.

But, we are not alone! A colleague has pointed us to an article by Zoe Corbyn in the Times Higher Educational Supplement. She warns UK academics that they can Expect few new titles in library as sterling's fall pounds acquisitions! I particularly liked this quote from one Michael Jubb -

"In some libraries, the extra costs for journal licences that they will face next year, simply as a result of the fall in the value of the pound, exceed the total of their current budgets for buying books."

Or maybe I don't even want to think about it!

A little while back I had a slightly tongue-in-cheek look at the idea of Information at the Press of a Button and suggested that we still had a fair way to go before this pleasant dream became a reality. What I was talking about was the complexity of digital information systems and the amount of sheer technical know-how that is still required to use them, but I realised this afternoon that looked at from a slightly different angle Information at the Press of a Button sometimes seems awfully close.

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