A new perspective on the world We are on threshold of a new era, in which the collective legacy of human knowledge and the information of the world, our global heritage, is finally being preserved and shared by all. The Web is a silent force of powerful impact. The power of information will create opportunities to better understand the world we all live in, to build on our unevenness, to respect, and then, learn from each other, perhaps to foster peace. If the task of preserving the world's cultural heritage appears daunting, the task of sharing educational resources with equity continues to appear hard to reac. That is where technology comes in.
Technology reaches where even the fundamental needs of life are scarce.
But, with a focus on developing nations, the Internet, more scarce than food in developing nations, was chosen as the agent of change. At the University of Nebraska a very large scale Web server, quietly does its work and grows, as far and strong as the corn fields near by. With a user population, first commercial, then educational, the US is the indisputable high user of the resource, alone almost matching the rest of the world's use. Even so, each month more than one hundred different countries are known to access the site. Yet it is only a fraction of the collections that line the halls in Paris.