Interviews with online users—both intermediaries and end—users—in The Media and The City are used as the basis for an assessment of funding and cost issues. Few experienced any difficulties obtaining financial support for online activities, with most justifying the expenditure on the grounds of savings in staff, material and space. The 'information-is-free' syn drome continues to restrict the online industry, and the atti tudes of some database hosts to this barrier are reported. The issue of cost-effectiveness is addressed by outlining the case of the iritermediary and that of the end-user. Many online users experience difficulties in determining which hosts or databases are the most cost-effective for a given search or service. The variant and constantly-shifting price structures adopted by hosts were at the heart of their problems and made cost benefit calculations particularly difficult.

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The highly publicized upheaval in the UK newspaper industry has brought significant implications for newspaper librarians, particularly with regard to the automation of procedures. This article offers an assessment of the kinds of information used and sought, and the kinds of information handling carried out. The function of the established personal collection is discussed. A more rewarding and prominent role for newspaper librarians in the future is envisaged, with online database use becoming a major factor: with this use will come a desirable transfer of emphasis from storage to retrieval. The apparent failure of some newspapers to include information services and systems in their modernization strategies is criticized.

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After six months of training Time-Life book researchers to use online databases it is clear that they will not become end-users overnight—despite plentiful training, good facilities, user-friendly interfaces and the like. The reasons for this are less clear but high on the list come: a lack of time (to learn and maintain the necessary searching skills); a general reluctance to abandon the tried and tested—and often pleasurable—conventional information retrieval methods (there is certainly nothing to suggest that the computer is going to replace the telephone as an information source); and the low priority given to the (formal) information-seeking component of the job (high priority being given to the more visible and pressing elements, like writing and commissioning pictures).There is little in Time-Life's online experience to lend support to the belief that there will be wide-scale end-user searching in the near future. Online will find its place in the array of information retrieval methods at the disposal of the user and will undoubtedly be used where manual methods have failed: it is unlikely, however, to supplant manual systems that work well and are well-liked.Secretaries do appear to be well-qualified, and in an excellent position to become a major end-user group and might indeed pose a threat to the librarian intermediary in the near future.