W hile attending the recent CAUSE con ference in Dallas called "Grasping the Momentum of the Information Age," I experi enced several surprises. The first, an hour-long pow er outage, happened while I was present ing a preconference on the virtual library. Since my partner and I had com pleted the computerassisted portion of our w orkshop, w e contin ued "in the dark" with oral presentations by several guest speakers and then moved on to small group discussions under dim emergency lighting.

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... event brought out with irony the fragility of the virtual library. Across the hall, however, George Brett, Joan Lippincott, and Peggy Seiden hot-wired their computers into the lighting system and continued with their w orkshop. The creativity and technical skill n eeded to do this also reflected on w here we are in the evolution of electronic information transfer. The second surprise was a comm ent made by one of our w orkshop participants, most of w hom w ere administrators in computing cen ters at colleges and universities. During a dis cussion of the roles of technologists and librar ians in creating the virtual library, the participant com m ented that it is hard to talk and work with librarians. We pursued this issue by ex ploring ways that the com puter center and the library can collaborate to provide access to netw orked information. A few of these strate gies included having group meetings, getting to know each other better, defining specific projects to work on together, reading the same literature, and identifying the right questions to ask in joint discussions. The group agreed that we need to redefine the roles on both sides, with computing center staff becoming more user oriented and library staff becom ing more tech nologically informed. $21.95; ACRL member $18.65,152p. $21.95; ACRL member $18.75,135p. 0-8389-7495-3,1991 0-8389-7219-5,1988