he management of academic library services assumed a vast new dimension of complexity when our profession concluded that its business is foremost the provision of access to information. For this seemingly simple conclusion implies that the management of academic libraries must look more deeply than ever before into its kaleidoscopic environment to fathom the most fruitful approaches to this singular, yet nebulous, goal. Like the bourgeois gentilhomme, who discovered that all his life he had been speaking prose, we have discovered our place in what now is called the scholarly communication system. The · system is not new, of course, any more tJlan is the role libraries play in it. The terms scholarly communication and system have not always been used together; moreover, the former phrase is of relatively recent coinage. It is entirely fitting that those two words be combined to create a special significance, however, because words with the ''scholar'' root are derived from Greek through the French scholies, meaning critical notes or footnotes. Thus, scholarly communication is well rooted in the concept of documented communication. That this communication functions in a system was both a premise and a conclusion of the American Council of Learned Societies' report on the subject, commonly referred to as the National Enquiry. 1 The present understanding of the phrase scholarly communication system may not have been advanced first in the National Enquiry report, but the phrase clearly gained acceptance as a result of its use in that document. Scholarly communication behaves as a system, that is, a group of components that are influenced by each other as well as by the group's environment, each component serving as the environment of a subsystem. Major components of the scholarly communication system are the scholars and scientists who initiate communication, publishers, librarians, and the scholars and scientists who receive that communication. Bearing in mind that this system overlaps others and that each component is a system itself, this brief description omits, although implies, many complexities. Literature on scholarly communication has been scattered and incohesive until very recently because this type of communication has not been examined very frequently as a system. Each of the components is surrounded by a corpus of litera-