Findings from a research project: Commercial CDROM titles in Italian university libraries

Abstract

1.1. Libraries and CDROMs: a survey CDROMs are now in widespread use in libraries, especially academic libraries. CDROMs have yet to achieve the fabulous market success once predicted for them, but their number has grown significantly in the context of electronic publishing. Twenty percent of the world's electronic products are, in fact, in the CDROM medium. Moving on to the type of information recorded, the annual growth rate of fulltext databases increased from 58% in 1985 to 490% in 1993 precisely because of the increased availability of this particular storage medium (Williams 1994).