The Internet as a networked system has been rendered more complex than ever before as human endpoints are grafted into the system via increasingly pervasive and personalized networked devices. According to the United Nations, the Internet is a transnational enabler of a number of human rights, and as such, access to the Internet has been…

This two-phase study of the use of networks and information retrieval systems by schools in Australia was designed to inquire as to the extent that schools are using all available networks; how appropriate and effective these sources of information are for schools; how costly such services might be; and what developments can be reasonably expected…

Offers a tutorial on telecommunications that covers the basic concepts, types, techniques, and protocols of data communications. Current scenarios for computer communications networks, their connectivity to global telecommunication environments, and global online retrieval services are discussed. Ten data communication networks and seven online…

This paper presents briefly the concept of the Internet and lists the Internet service providers in India (Education and Research Network from Department of Electronics, National Informatics Network from National Informatics Center, Gateway Internet Access Service from Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited, and SOFTNET from Software Technology Parks India)…

Describes Project Jupiter, which was developed to promote the United Kingdom's Joint Academic Network (JANET) to its member libraries. Library uses of JANET are described, including online catalogs, commercial services, and electronic mail; the convergence of local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs) is discussed; and future…

Traces the development of database production and the online industry in Australia, focusing on recent trends, problems and prospects for future online and CD-ROM use. Argues that new pricing arrangements can provide growth in a market fragmented by increases in specialization and government information, and in numbers of vendors, databases, end…

This paper summarizes the experiences acquired during the European research project, "On the Move," and draws on some conclusions on how mobility will impact information service providers. The paper begins with a definition of mobile information systems and explains the On the Move project; the goal of On the Move is to develop a…

This paper outlines the market developments, governmental promotion policies, and efforts by private industries for online database services in Japan since the late 1970s. The combination of these efforts over the years has resulted in an online database service market of US$20 billion annually, of which approximately one third is Western online…

Starting in the 1980s the online world has seen two models: the French model, Minitel, and the American model, Internet. At the end of 1995 the Minitel network was the biggest and oldest online service with 7 million users and 20,000 service providers; one year later, the Internet arrived. Tomorrow's online model will need to be: as familiar to…

A distributed union catalog is a network of bibliographic systems that cooperate to enable their users to discover sites that hold copies of known items. Some participating systems will be traditional union catalogs, others will be single sites with comprehensive collections, and others will be local or regional resource sharing systems. A…

The virtual Canadian union catalog (vCuc) project is a project among Canadian libraries to use Z39.50 (an information protocol standard) for searching distributed individual library catalogs and union catalogs. This paper summarizes the major technical, vendor, bibliographic data, and administrative issues that must be resolved before the…