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The article reports on how the Austrian National Library in Vienna, Austria is working on converting historical documents into digital documents, so that they can be published on the internet. The project is focusing on the daily newspapers that were published in the constituent lands of the Austrian Empire during the reign of the House of Habsburg, an Austrian royal ruling family, and is being financed by the ERSTE Stiftung, a foundation of the Erste Bank financial institution.

The article introduces this issue of the journal, which documents papers presented at the ODOK (Österreiches Online-Informationstreffen and Österreichischer Dokumentartag/Austrian Online Information Resources Conference and Austrian Documentation Conference) meetings in Wels, Austria, in 2012 and in Leoben, Austria, in 2010.

This paper reports selected results of an empirical study where library executives from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as well as from Great Britain and the USA, were consulted with respect to the future of the library system. The latter two countries were selected since they are frequently considered in international comparisons because of their model fonction. Apart from the evaluation of the current country-specific situation, the judgment of alternative future scenarios regarding their probability of occurrence constituted the main focus of this questioning. The concurrences and differences resulting from the individual estimates can be helpful when carrying out strategic planning in the German library system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]