The Internet, the worldwide system of interconnected computer networks, has become the foundation of computer communications over the last two decades. Fibre optics have revolutionised digital transmission in much the same way as integrated circuits have revolutionised digital electronics. The parallel development of Local Area Network (LAN) technology has meant that computers connected to LANs give users shared access to information stores and peripheral equipment. An increase in communications bandwidth, based on optical fibre, is now seen as the requirement to facihtate future high-speed access to data, graphics and sound. At the start of this research project, these requirements were being translated into actions in the United States, with the passing of the National High Performance Computing Act, establishing NREN (the National Research and Education Network) and in the UK with the awarding of the SuperJANET contract to British Telecom in November 1992, worth 18 million pounds.
The origins of the Internet can be traced back to the ARPAnet (US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) Project of the late 1960s which was an experiment in packet switched networking to support military research, through the USENET (Network News) and BITNET academic network developments of the 1970s to the establishment in 1986 of the N SFNET (The National Science Foundation), designed to link together US researchers through 5 super-computer centres, standardising on TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) as its communications protocol.
JANET (the Joint Academic Network and the UK part of the Internet) was established by the Computer Board in 1984, has over 200 higher education and research organisations connected to it and supports two major network protocols, ISO ’s OSI (International Organisation for Standardisation’s open system interconnection) and IP (Internet Protocol). It is funded by the Department for Education and Employment (Department of Education and Science in 1992) through the Higher Education Funding Councils’ JISC (the Computer Board's successor).
By the commencement of this research project and throughout its duration, the Internet experienced exponential growth in the number of networks, the number of hosts and the volume of traffic. The President of the Internet Society was reported to have stated in the summer of 1993 that there were between 5 and 15 million individual Internet users and that the numbers were doubling each year (Pool, 1993). According to the Internet Society’s statistics (Internet Society, 1996), the number of networks increased from 7,354 (October 1992) to 79,986 (September
1995); the number of host computers increased from 1,136,000 (October 1992) to 7,891,869 (October 1995) - a seven fold increase; and the number was projected to more than double again to 17,753,266 by January 1997. A 1996 survey by NUA Ltd. (NUA Internet surveys, 1997) reported that: 83% of Internet users were located in the US and only 6% in Europe; 80% of them preferred Netscape as an Internet browser; and a greater percentage of users accessed the Internet from work in Europe, whereas most accessed it from home in the US.
By 1992, library networking had become widely established, facilitated by the establishment of UKOLN at the University of Bath and its hosting of a number of datasets, most notably ISI's Citation Databases, giving access to academic end- users. Use of JANET in the library community has been promoted also by JUGL out of which has grown BUBL (Bulletin Board for Libraries) (originally run jointly by the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde and now based at the University of Bath). Training projects such as Jupiter and the M ailbase project at Newcastle have also been important for libraries, M ailbase’s impact being evident in the managing of 244 mailing lists during the first year of this research project (July 1993) and an impressive 1527 lists by January 1997.
In the United States the Clinton Administration, particularly Vice President Senator Gore, was reported to be heavily committed to the Internet, a reflection of its perceived importance. UKOLN published a report (UKOLN, 1993) highlighting the importance of networks and calling for a national policy for the development of the physical network and for the services that run on it. Robinson (1993) listed the bodies concerned with networking within the UK: the ACN (Advisory Committee on Networking), and UKERNA, both funded from the HEFC via the JISC; BIC (Book Industry Communications), lUCC (Inter University Computing Committee), and SCONUL (Standing Conference on
National and University Libraries), who have joined forces to form the INA (Information Networking Alhance), which mirrors the US organisation CNI (Coalition for Networked Information). “A national forum is still lacking however, although interested parties are growing, to include: the British Library, Janet User Group for Libraries (JUGL), Laser/Viscount, Library and Information Cooperation Council (LINC), the Library Association, Pubhc Libraries Networking Awareness Steering Group, and the Publishers Association” (Robinson, 1993). The final year of this research project (1995) saw the formation of the Library and Information Commission, which was set up as a national focus of expertise in library and information services of all types and in all sectors in the context of rapid technological change. Its remit is to be a national focus for library and information services, to advise government on library and information services issues, to encourage co-operation and co-ordination, to develop a UK research policy, and to represent the UK internationally. M ore recently, the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (1997) has recommended that the JISC should: continue to manage and fund quality and cost-effective Communications and Information Technology (C&IT) services for researchers, introduce charges for services on a volume-of-usage basis, and be invited to report, within a year, on options to provide sufficient protected bandwidth to support UK research.
In 1992, the information practitioner's ability to access the Internet's resources and to gain familiarity with navigation tools such as Alex (filesystem providing transparent read access to files in anonymous ftp sites), Archie (database of anonymous ftp files). Gopher (network browser), Veronica (Gopher menu hopper), Jughead (Gopher indexed file locator), world wide web (document linker, hyper text driven), and WAIS (text searcher) was becoming increasingly important. Comprehensive texts, such as Krol's (1992; 1994) volumes and a host (for example Dem, 1992; Polly, 1992; Bauwens, 1993; W ard, 1993) of brief guides and tours of the Internet resources and navigation tools facilitated the familiarisation process. During the project period, the production of guides continued to flourish (Addyman, 1994, Glowniak and Bushway, 1994; M organ 1994; Noonan, 1994; Price-Wilkin, 1994; Fumer-Hines and Willett, 1995) but by 1995, the vast expansion of Internet resources and access to them required information professionals to have some knowledge of the pros and cons o f the
various web search engines (Winship, 1995). Important for practitioners also is an appreciation of some of the system debates and controversies, such as whether or not the OSI standard will eventually replace TCP/IP; or whether the Z39.50 protocol will replace the http protocol (Dempsey, 1993; Joy and M urray, 1995; Dempsey et al., 1996). The technical aspects of these matters are not as important as an awareness of the debates and an understanding of the implications for our profession and on our users of their implementation.
Although there were no exact statistics on what percentage of research scientists or humanities scholars were Internet users, it had been suggested that some groups, such as computer science and electrical engineering, had almost 100% participation, usually started by electronic mail. Examples are the Professor of Classical Studies and coordinator of the Center for Computer Analysis of Classical Texts at the University of Pennsylvania who is reported (Pool, 1993) as stating that a sort of virtual university was being created with electronic mail. “There's one colleague [at another university] whom I used to speak with maybe a couple of times a year. Now w ere in e-mail contact twice a day”. In physics, Paul Ginsparg (Taubes, 1993) at Los Alamos National Laboratory had set up several bulletin boards that accepted preprints and sent out the abstracts to thousands of subscribers, who could download full texts of any interesting papers. In biology in the early 1990s, researchers were reportedly routinely accessing hundreds of databases containing genetic maps and protein structures (Courteau, 1991). Indeed, it was often independent researchers who had developed the above- mentioned software tools to help navigate the Internet and then distributed them for anyone to use. The Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval in North Carolina had an important role here. It was created as a research and development group specialising in distributed information systems in 1992, by a three year co-operation agreement between the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC) and the National Science Foundation.
As this trend towards making more and more information easier and easier to get continued. Pool (1993) maintained that “electronic communities” would be created, meaning “collections of researchers in a single field who are linked electronically and who share information, instruments, software and even computing capability” . W ulf (1993), Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia, called these envisaged electronic communities “national collaboratories” (the word
“collaboratory” being a combination of the words collaboration and laboratory). A 1993 National Research Council (NRC) report (National Research Council, 1993) entitled “National Collaboratories: Applying Information Technology for Scientific Research”, explored the ways in which information technology could be used to support a much broader range of the activities in scientific enquiry.
Such developments as the use of the networks by researchers to collaborate in new ways would have far reaching implications for information practitioners and their services.