ut should we have to? Publishing in print on paper has spawned a complex, intricate industry, which desktop publishing has augmented, not destroyed. Some writers are lucky, or very talented or both. They can sit at their desks, confident that the next publisher will soon be knocking at their door. Others have to expend their energies in seeking out a publisher to whose star they may be able to hitch the wagon containing their creation. The whole drawn-out process of tying author to publisher acts as a filtering device. So many seeds of ideas may germinate in writers' minds. Only a fraction will see the light of day as what we call 'publications'.

In the environment of the Internet, this filtering process is much less likely to occur. The Internet is not only a theatre where new ideas strut their stuff before the world. It is also a labour ward where new ideas are born. Plain experience tells us that the immediacy, the vigour and the breadth of the intellectual interchange facilitated by the Net can fertilise the ground and help new ideas to take root and grow more surely and quickly. But I am one of those who has deplored some aspects of the growth of traditional publishing. Pressurised by the need to pursue tenure, or by the next Research Assessment Exercise, or by some less definable push from the 'publish or perish' syndrome, scholars, I have argued, can be driven by the feeling that they have to say something, more than by the feeling that they have something to say.

Fundamentally, there is no reason why a peer review system should not impose a discipline on all this, and I am sure that we shall see peer review making its presence felt more and more. In a conference hall, the voice of the chosen speaker can ultimately be distinguished from the hubbub of the audience's conversations. It has been selected for a hearing by a form of peer review, though it may not, by that token, necessarily be wiser or better informed, as an unexpected intervention from the floor may eventually show. In the electronic environment, outright control, which sounds like an intrinsically reactionary response, may prove to be unimportant. What we may need are mechanisms for singling out statements likely to prove more authoritative from statements of the other kind. At the same time, the Internet does seem to have a desirable potential for democratising and delayering scholarship, and making it easier for the new voice, especially the new critical voice, to get a hearing. We need to be careful that any efforts to save people from drowning in the ever-deepening information pool lay emphasis on helping them swim better, not on emptying the water out.

Information sources that have authority are not just welcome in themselves. They feature among the signposts and totem poles of any well-understood intellectual context. One feature of the Internet is the impression it conveys, that the new world of information is a world without signposts and totem poles, a world of chaos. To the minds of librarians,this can seem particularly offensive. As a colleague of mine vividly expressed it: "The Internet? It's like going into a large room full of books just thrown about on the floor." In a conventional library setting, there are a surprising number of conventions which are unconsciously invoked, but are crucial to library use at even the most primitive level. For example, an understanding of 'alphabetical order' is taken for granted, though there are people who are perfectly intelligent in other respects but find alphabetical order difficult. Likewise, we take it for granted that books are shelved Western-page style, from top left to bottom right. And the simple title page of a book encapsulates centuries of evolution towards structured information transfer - as would occur to anyone who looks instead at the deep-plunging and mystifying incipit of a medieval manuscript.

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