Hear! Hear! What good is the information highway, if it is used as a trash dump? Your personal experiences exemplify clearly and well the problem about which I wrote yesterday. Thank you. Many folks, like BBB, live and work in small rural communities with either no local libraries, or small libraries. These libraries do well to find classic novels and local newspapers, let alone grey literature, regional publications, dissertations and so on. Their resources are limited by the amount of money local folks want to spend on a library. In some places it isn't much. Small isn't the only problem. Apparently, the Department of Energy (DOE; where I work, and which coincidentially funds some research at Univ. of Calif. at Berkeley) produces unclassified literature that some folks at Berkeley sometimes find difficult to locate. (Scientists at Berkeley have complained to me about it.) For them, often a simple Internet e-mail to the right person at DOE HQ often gets the desired document. Did the Berkeley inter-library loan system fail them? Was the requestor to lazy to ask the library? Did the requestor ask them the right question? Was the request lacking key words? Who knows? Who cares? The problem of having easy access to information is greater outside large industrialized countries, such as the U.S. Based on personal travel experiences (which are rather extensive) many less industrialized locations don't have libraries. Far more locations have at least someone with Internet access and some type of computerized communication systems. IMHO, one of the greatest values of the Internet is its capabilities to be used as an International Information Highway. When we use it more like an Information Eastshore Freeway in Berkeley, its potential benefits are severely limited. With appropriate disclaimers. [log in to unmask]