Assessing the roles that a small specialist library pPlays to guide the development of a hybrid digital library.

This paper analyses the ways that small, specialist libraries support their user communities and based on that analysis suggests ways that this support could be surrogated online in digital library systems. Much of the published digital library work concentrates on academic or commercial libraries, hence the originality of this work is that it looks at other kinds of libraries. The direct impact of this paper is that it inspired a post graduate degree project at City University, the results of which are to be published in Information Processing and Management journal.