Discussion covered the distribution, location and funding of computer facilities, as well as the nature of associated research which might be developed. The library was not considered to be the only laboratory for the arts and social sciences, and it was pointed out that many IT applications were to be found outside libraries at faculty and departmental level in student laboratories and on staff desktops. Some felt that this was a trend to be encouraged, and that halls of residence were another useful location for computing facilities. The funds for such provision, it was argued, should be sought by the Humanities and Social Sciences making common cause for a larger part of the equipment budget in universities, rather than leaving the initiative to the hard sciences.
It was reported that the current situation was such that sometimes students had better facilities than academics, although this may have been as a consequence of resistance to change by the latter. As a result of this unequal distribution, research supervisors were not, on occasion, sufficiently experienced in computing to appreciate the activities of students in this area. The rapid introduction of computers into research was not encouraged in some universities because of the relative inflexibility of older computer staff who were orientated towards mainframe machines and not so sympathetic to scholars who were not number-crunchers.
Turning to research and the library, it was argued that cataloguers need to be trained even if they are computer-literate, and that there was no reason why cataloguing, which is an academic task, could not itself be a research topic similar to bibliographical work or editing of texts, perhaps for an MRes degree.
Access to books for universities geographically situated far from well-stocked libraries was considered. There was no consensus on the solution to this problem, although possible approaches included the electronic library approach of the University of Virginia in the United States and a possible dramatic acceleration of the British Library ordering system. The increasing strictness of copyright laws in the UK was seen as a constraint upon the demands of growing universities. The time had come when academics and librarians could address the possibility of publishing electronically without reference to publishing houses.
The question which the workshop chose at the end of its session to put the conference was:
As the work of both librarians and researchers is changing in response to technical circumstances, is it now the moment for a closer partnership of libraries and researchers, possibly excluding publishers? Ideas for research could include archive cataloguing, bibliographical work, and historical dictionaries of language.