Gateways employ qualified editors with subject knowledge. They also have formal selection and collection development policies. The solution for many European gateways has been to mobilise the academic and library communities to join the international gateway effort. Distributed teams of experts can contribute to gateways as part of their professional work. Librarians, university academics and professional people can spend a few hours a week building the gateway collections.
Gateways use Web technologies that enable distributed working.
The databases can be accessed remotely and editing can be done from any networked computer with a Web browser. The Internet offers great potential for co-operation between gateway services, since it allows geographically distributed databases and people to communicate with one other and to work together to build integrated services. A lot of research and development has been done on how gateways can be made to interoperate and this has highlighted the areas where standards are needed to make this possible. No matter what the user's information needs, skill level or educational background, they all face a number of similar problems in relation to using the Internet as an information searching and retrieval tool. Searching issues - the sheer volume of information makes searching difficult.