The recent capability to easily transmit good quality pictures over the Net has accelerated catalog sales in recent months. The Internet provides a cheap and effective way to make available research reports, census data, court decisions and public domain software worldwide at very low cost. And this capability has been exploited. Thousands of universities and companies have set up archive nodes on the network, open to the public. The U.S. Federal Government has been mandated to provide on the Internet the enormous volume of data and reports it funds and produces before it is available in other forms.
Today there are millions of files available for the taking.
In the future there will be much more. Vast quantities of information is only useful if it's organized and accessible. There are tools on the Internet that periodically scan the public archive sites, build indices to the available files and provide us with tools for searching all the archives worldwide for items of interest. If you make your reports available in Des Moines, an interested customer can find them from Delhi. 6 Lots of information is organized for browsing Searching for information works well when you know what you're looking for.