Predicting the future is always a treacherous task. Taking a twenty-year leap into the future of networked information resources is well beyond my prophetic ability, but let's take a look at the near term. This new year holds the promise of greater increases in information resources accessible on the Internet, primarily on the Web. This year will also see more concerns about bandwidth and software capabilities. The coming months should see, if nothing else, significant increases in the information content on the Internet and on many Intranets.
Many projects are under way to convert existing information sources into Web-accessible resources.
At the same time, other information resources will continue to be available on the Web. One piece of the information retrieval puzzle will be to check the date of the resource. The use of Intranets with a WWW browser as client software has become common in the commercial world, and some versions of the Intranet are making inroads at government and educational organizations as well. Use of an Intranet enables information dissemination and communication within an organization. For both finding and delivering information within your organization, the Intranet will become an increasingly crucial tool.