Advances in Network Information

Access to information using the Internet has undergone dramatic change and expansion recently. The unrivaled success of the World Wide Web has altered the Internet from something approachable only by the initiated to something of a media craze – the information superhighway made manifest in the personal ‘home page.’ This paper surveys the beginnings of network information discovery and retrieval, how the Web has created a surprising level of integration of these systems, and where the current state of the art lies in creating globally accessible information spaces and supporting access to those information spaces. * This work was supported in part by NASA as part of the Repository Based Software Engineering project, cooperative agreement NCC-9-16.