The main barriers for Latin America's participation in the digital culture are: the few people with access to technology; the technological infrastructure; lack of relevant contents in primary languages; and English as the predominant language of the global information infrastructure. Nations should focus on infrastructure, contents, and access.…

The Internet opens a wide range of possibilities for accessing materials on the Holocaust from both traditional sources and more volatile areas (personal homepages, e-mail, and discussion groups archives). Excerpts from accounts by one Hungarian and one Norwegian political prisoner are included as illustrations of material which may not have been…

Discusses the New Learning Communities (NLC) program developed by CNI (Coalition for Networked Information) to support pioneers in education who use networking and networked information to support student-centered teaching and learning. Highlights include computer networks in higher education, especially the Internet; information literacy skills;…

Presents insights into the state of networking of the near future. Discusses the promotion of virtual reality in every-day society; the unlimited bandwidth of optical networking; and terrestrial wireless links tethered to optical tools. (AEF)

Many catalogs are built in an ad hoc fashion, which results in uncertain quality in publicly accessible network catalogs. This article discusses problems facing designers building catalogs for large networks, relating them to resource discovery; provides a usability framework based on library science and human computer interaction literature; and…

Discusses the history, goals, and partnerships of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) created in October 1997 and the hiring of Doug Van Houweling as CEO. UCAID supports Internet2 (or Internet II) a collaborative effort between higher education and industry to facilitate and coordinate the development of advanced…

Moving corporate systems onto an intranet will increase the data traffic within the corporate network, which necessitates a high-quality management process to the intranet. Discusses costs and benefits of adopting an intranet, tool availability and selection criteria, and management issues for developing an intranet. (Author/AEF)

Reviews the current state of the Internet as a data transport system and some of its emerging problems. Discusses two major research initiatives--Internet 2 and Next Generation Internet (NGI)--and network-level services that may see deployment in these new research testbeds. Concludes with speculations about future changes to the Internet as a…

Looks briefly at the history of World Wide Web search engine development and considers the current state of affairs. Reflects on future directions in terms of personalization, summarization, query expansion, coverage, and metadata. (Author/AEF)

Describes a study that involved setting up an expanded counseling network with an emphasis on professional service provision, and combining this with the training and professional development of a network of part-time counselors. Ethical and practical issues are explored in detail, and encouragement is given to other institutions to use a similar…

Outlines the theory behind the formation of language conventions, then reveals conventions evolving in the community of people writing hypertext on the Web. Demonstrates how these conventions can be used to augment and shift the meaning of already published hypertexts. Describes the system called InCommonSense, which reuses particular hypertext…

Uses data over a seven-month period from three teams' use of a collaborative electronic technology ("Team Room") to illustrate that genre systems--sequences of interrelated communicative actions--are a means of structuring (deliberately or habitually) six dimensions of communicative interaction: purpose (why), content (what),…

Based on analysis of theme interviews of 23 informants (1997) and quantitative data from a national survey in Finland (1996), the role of the Internet in information seeking is explored. Major research questions included: by which criteria networked sources are preferred in information seeking, and to what extent the Internet replaces other media…

Outlines the classical digital library model, which is derived from traditional practices of library and information science professionals, as an alternative to the database retrieval model. Reports preliminary results from an evaluation study of library and information professionals and endusers involved with primary care medicine. (AEF)

Explores the feasibility of a centralized, networked reference service in a library setting by comparing traditional reference services at the County of Los Angeles Public Library with a commercial inbound call center. Discusses costs and efficiency when librarians answer questions able to be handled by paraprofessionals. (Author/LRW)