Company Directors

Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey

" An increasing amount of information of the type that people expect to find in libraries - reference works, literature, government publications, journals and financial information is only going to be available in electronic form in the future and can be searched more effectively in electronic form than in printed form (for example, a reference book, annual in print but updated weekly online).
Libraries are connected to other libraries through the Internet and can share resources. The ability of the small library to access the resources of the large library (which will be encouraged by publishers through increasingly competitive access fees for networks of libraries) expands the potential of the library by many hundreds of times. No longer are the resources of a single library restricted by what the building will hold and what the library on its own can afford.
Libraries are already getting connected to the Internet but it is patchy and ad hoc confined mainly to larger public libraries in wealthier areas. By 2000 some of these pioneering libraries will be on their third generation of hardware while others will be still unconnected. In this way the gap between the information-rich and the information-poor will grow unless we are able to establish a national programme of networking all public libraries through the Internet, as is being proposed by Information for All. "

Sir Charles is Chairman of the Chadwyck-Healey group of publishing companies which he founded in 1973. He has been publishing books, microforms and now electronic databases for libraries for the last 28 years. Chadwyck-Healey has been publishing in electronic media for the last eight years.

He is also a member of the Library and Information Commission.

Sir Charles was asked by the Library and Information Commission and the Library Association to set up a not for profit company (Information for All) to research ways in which a national programme for networking public libraries could be organised and funded. Information for All's bid to the Millennium Commission for £50milllion towards the funding of such a programme is part of this initiative.

Contact Details

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Last revised 29-Jan-1997

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