The paper argues that digital media have a disruptive potential, but path dependency is often a modifying component in the historical development. This is demonstrated in different stages of the development of the interrelationship between digitization, digital media and research libraries. Today the historical dynamic has reached a point where all institutions concerned with knowledge handling will have to redefine themselves. Research libraries are gradually incorporated into a number of new “research infrastructures” which are being built around different kinds of data materials, and each research library may specialize according to some sort of coordinated criteria.