Prospects for the global Internet: new techniques for delivering rich digital collections to users world‐wide

Every user of the World Wide Web understands why the WWW is often ridiculed as the World Wide Wait. The WWW and other applications on the Internet have been developed with a client‐server orientation that, in its simplest form, involves a centralized information repository to which users (clients) send requests. This single‐server model suffers from performance problems when clients are too numerous, when clients are physically far away in the Network, when the materials being delivered become very large and hence stress the wide‐area bandwidth, and when the information has a real‐time delivery component as with streaming audio and video materials. Engineering information delivery solutions that break the single‐site model has become an important aspect of next‐generation WWW delivery systems. Intends to help the information professional understand what new directions the delivery infrastructure of the WWW is taking and why these technical changes will impact users around the globe, especially in bandwidth‐poor areas of the Internet.