The diffusion of Internet is changing the role of archives and libraries and it is opening a wide range of new possibilities. The new vision is that in few years it will be possible to cross-access multiple libraries, archives, museums, and data repositories. The implementation of this revolutionary vision requires the solution of a number of technical, organizational, sociological, and economical issues. Recently, the proposal of a new, low cost technical solution for open repositories of pre-print material, the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting ( OAI-PMH), has greatly stimulated the discussion about these issues in many application frameworks. This paper overviews the status of this discussion in the library and conventional archives frameworks.