NEARLY a decade ago my company closed down it's library containing thousands of books, journals and magazines. Although it housed one of Britain's biggest collections of technical works, worth millions of pounds, we gave the contents to anyone who would take it all away. Universities, colleges, and individuals benefited greatly from this act of business transformation. Of course, most of these thousands of books will still be sitting on shelves, unopened and unused.

How did we make the decision to do this? Well, a survey showed that more than 95 per cent of the books and papers were never accessed in five years or more, and the half-life of the information they contained was less than six months, and we were rapidly running out of storage space. Bluntly, we just could not afford more real estate and people; the trajectory was a painful dead end.

Today we have the second largest electronic library in the world, occupying less than 20 per cent of the physical space and employing 70 per cent fewer people. But more important, people now use it extensively 24 hours a day all over the planet.

Along with all good R&D facilities, the people at my laboratory seek to publish and make known their findings through conferences and the respected journals of the various scientific and engineering institutions.

We have also maintained our own internally produced journal to give colleagues, collaborators and customers a rapid first-hand route to our work. But in the past few years it has become obvious that these routes to the eyes and minds of others have become degraded and discounted.

The younger members of my staff don't even flick through respected journals now, they just bin it all. In their minds, if it isn't online it doesn't exist. And I have to say that they have a point. Not only are paper journals far too late, with most taking a year to produce, they present a wholly inadequate medium to explain the complexities of modern science and engineering.

So for the Millennium my team took the bold decision to make a giant leap: produce our British Telecom Technology Journal as an online multimedia experience. It was intended that this would be a primary means of rapidly reporting what we do, to engage those interested in discussion and debate, and provide a portal for the wider access at an educational and professional level.

Like the closing of our paper library before, this was not without risk. We had established an audience of more than 3,000 specialists who regularly received paper copies of our journal. Would they like the new system? Would we lose them? How much would it cost? Despite significant doubts and fears, we went ahead and produced the world's first engineering online journal.

In the first week the website received more than 42,000 hits with visitors downloading gigabytes, and this has not subsided as the world discovers the availability - QED. If you pay a visit via www.bt.com/bttj or my home page you will discover a wide range of content, including past written papers. The new content presents a spectrum of approaches as authors feel their way into this new medium - it isn't perfect, but it is a good start. And next? VR.

Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is:
http://cochrane.org.uk