NREN for All: Insurmountable Opportunity

NREN for All:
Insurmountable Opportunity
c. 1993 Jean Armour Polly Manager of Network Development and User Training NYSERNet, Inc. jpolly@nysernet.org
This was originally published in the February 1, 1993 issue of Library Journal (volume 118, n. 2, pp 38-41). It may be freely reprinted for educational use, please let me know if you are redistributing it, I like to know if it's useful and where it's been. Please do not sell it, and keep this message intact.
When Senator Al Gore was evangelizing support for his visionary National Research and Education Network bill, he often pointed to the many benefits of a high-speed, multi-lane, multi-level data superhighway. Some of these included:
— collaborating research teams, physically distant from each other, working on shared projects via high speed computer networks. Some of these grand challenges might model global environmental change, or new therapeutic drug research, or the design of a new airplane for inexpensive consumer air travel.
— a scientist or engineer might design a product, which could be instantly communicated to a manufacturing plant, whose robotic machine could turn the drawing-board product into reality. One example of this is the capability to digitally measure a new recruit for an army uniform, transmit the information to a clothing manufacturer, and take delivery of a custom-tailored uniform the next day.
— access to digital libraries of information, both textual and graphic. Besides hundreds of online public access catalogs, and full text documents, color illustrations of photographic quality, full motion videos and digital audio will also be available over the network.
In his many articles and speeches touting the bill, Gore often used an example of a little girl, living in a rural area, at work on a school project. Was she information-poor due to her physical location, far from the resources of large cities? No— the National Research and Education Network would give her the capability to dial into the Library of Congress— to collect information on dinosaurs.