Between the devil and the deep blue sea: how the publishing department of an international organization tries to address the challenges of information delivery in a changing environment.

The World Bank, one of the largest development agencies in the world, publishes about 150 publications in print every year. Its publishing department ("The Office of the Publisher") launched between 2001 and 2007 four online, subscription-based services called World Bank Online Resources, consisting of two statistical databases, one portal of analysis of global economic conditions, and a collection of about 4,000 e-books and working papers. The experience with online collections has been overall very positive so far. However, a number of questions and challenges present themselves as technology evolves and demand grows at a time of technology renaissance and a second internet boom. This paper discusses the experience of the Bank as regards the following: changes needed in internal workflows and organizational habits; the tension between mission and cost-recovery as regards free electronic access to the new online services; the challenges posed by technology developments, which create the need to upgrade and invest in the systems fairly frequently and extensively; the rise of new actors such as Google; the increasing demand for online content and tools to make content more user-friendly on the side of the users' community - librarians, intermediaries and end-users; which practices work and which do not in developing vs. developed countries, and how to ensure that the end-users in developing countries can get access to a wealth of information they need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]