The William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (Washington) is a collaborative user facility with many unique scientific capabilities. The EMSL expects to support many of its remote users and collaborators by electronic means and is creating a collaborative environment for this purpose with capabilities ranging from chat and videoconferencing to shared applications, electronic notebooks, and remote-controlled instruments. This paper describes some of the particular capabilities required to support scientific collaborations, the status and direction of the EMSL tools, and several early uses of the EMSL software in both research and education collaborations. The first section presents a taxonomy of the types of research collaborations that currently exist (peer-to-peer, mentor-student, inter-disciplinary, producer-consumer) and evaluates the communications needs for each type. EMSL's real-time Collaborative Research Environment (CORE) is described in the next section, and the following capabilities/components are summarized: WebTour, file sharing, chat box, TeleViewer, Electronic Laboratory Notebook, on-line instruments, whiteboard, and audio/video conferencing. The third section describes the use of CORE in research and education settings. Together, these topics define a vision for natural, in-depth, virtual partnerships in research and education. A figure presents the CORE World Wide Web interface. (Author/AEF)