Discusses the current status of 4 developments that will determine the emergence of generally available multimedia information services: high-bandwidth networks; inexpensive user appliances capable of handling multimedia; adoption of standards for representation, compression, packaging, and transmission; and development of a corpus of multimedia…

Focuses on the trend to combine Web access and CD networks, benefits of considering the community network environment as a whole, and need for flexibility in considering new technologies. Describes the Occidental College Library (California) experience of building and sharing a network and network file server. (PEN)