Paper remains widely used and printed national bibliographies can still deliver an effective service. Rising production and distribution costs are however likely to render paper uneconomic in the short to medium term. In order to reduce these overheads some NBA’s offer hybrid options with users encouraged to download and locally view or print electronic documents containing bibliographic records that reflect the layout of traditional print bibliographies.

Rather like the bibliographies they replace such hybrid solutions normally include a relatively small selection of metadata (e.g. a weekly cumulation) but when linked to sophisticated online databases can enable users to generate their own unique customized record selections in a far more flexible way than traditional publication methods previously allowed.