This paper gives an account of the origin and development of the Open Access Initiative (OAI) and the digital technology that enables its existence. The researcher explains the crisis in scholarly communications and how open access (OA) can reform the present system. OA has evolved two systems for delivering research articles: OA archives or repositories and OA journals. They differ in that OA journals conduct peer review and OA archives do not. Discussion focuses on how these two delivery systems work, including such topics as OAI, local institutional repositories, Eprints self-archiving software, cross-archives searching, metadata harvesting, and the individuals who invented OA and organizations that support it.

In the fall of 2002, Ohio State University along with the University of Washington, the University of Western Australia, Washington State University, and Glasgow University entered into a development partnership with Innovative Interfaces. The goal was to develop a module to manage electronic resources, integrated into Innovative’s Millennium library system. The product, Electronic Resource Management (ERM), became available in 2004 and is based on the work of the Digital Library Federation Electronic Resources Management Initiative. This article focuses on one aspect of ERM, the integration of the module with the Web OPAC, and describes how the Ohio State University Libraries replaced a back-end database with ERM to support lists of electronic resources on their Web site.

MARC 21 records may be encoded in individual character sets (including ASCII and ANSEL) or in Unicode (as UTF-8). This paper considers the effect of the use of Unicode without any constraints on the structure and data content of MARC 21 records. The case of Model A records where Latin is the preferred script is examined in particular detail.

Voice recognition software allows computer users to bypass their keyboards and use their voices to enter text. While the library literature is somewhat silent about voice recognition technology, the medical and legal communities have reported some success using it. Voice recognition software was tested for dictation accuracy and usability within an agriculture library at the University of Illinois. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8.0 was found to be more accurate than speech recognition within Microsoft Office 2003. Helpful Web sites and a short history regarding this breakthrough technology are included.

Internet sources are increasingly used in scholarly work at all levels, yet it is often difficult to collect the information needed to cite these sources properly. The author proposes a method by which bibliographic information embedded in electronic sources could be automatically extracted when needed and discusses existing standards that could be utilized to accomplish this and impediments to implementation.