Introduction Building a personal or company web site is now a commonplace activity, with an increasing array of commercial tools available to make the task easier and an increasing number of search facilities available to help users locate information on these sites. Mostly, though, the model for information access is based on the notion of a single provider and a single consumer. A complete list of partners and further information about the project can be found on the project web site . Researchers typically have more exacting requirements and greater awareness of technical potential than general network users. Without such services, information on the Web would be effectively inaccessible.
Researchers are professional information users.
They need prompt access to current information that is relevant to their field of research and of scholarly quality. Even assuming that researchers can find the information they are looking for, actually getting it can be a slow process. Available network bandwidth never exceeds demand and considerable amounts of researchers time can be wasted if a potentially-promising document takes half an hour to retrieve, only to be found to be less promising than at first thought. It is unreasonable to expect the provider of a frequently consulted information resource to provide the large amounts of network capacity required to support its efficient retrieval by those wishing to exploit it. Even if in principle information can be efficiently retrieved, it is of little use if the information cannot be retrieved reliably and repeatably.