technologies. Information management technologies are central to both lines of development, but the technologies and approaches differ substantially between the two lines of development.

To be effective, digital library systems must be user-centered systems. Research is necessary to better characterize the needs and requirements of different classes of (potential) users of digital library systems, and to gain insight into how to adapt systems to specific user needs and behaviors. Although much digital library research has focused on "public" digital library services, public digital libraries form one end of a continuum that also encompasses personal information spaces and work-group or organizational information spaces. Linking digital libraries to personal and work-group information management systems is a central research and design issue—for example, to develop distributed systems for collaborative data exploration. There are also major demands for training and user support, as well as effective management by librarians of information repositories.

As in crisis management, one of the key issues involves information filtering, categorization, and ranking in situations where there is likely to be too much relevant information with which the user of the system must cope. However, the range of information that must be processed in the crisis management context is likely to be more tentative and questionable, and the qualification, authentication, and filtering of information constitute a much more difficult issue. In addition, crisis management has a much more demanding real-time constraint. This largely precludes the benefits of librarians skilled in evaluating and organizing information; digital libraries can allow a great deal of human or machine preprocessing. In both digital libraries and crisis management, incoming information may sometimes be incomplete, anomalous, suspect, or even actively falsified. The real-time constraint of the crisis management application requires adapting to and compensating for these problems, whereas a digital library can simply defer the data for later human review or confirmation from supplementary input sources.

In summary, many aspects of crisis management are functionally equivalent to digital library applications, but with real-time processing constraints (to meet urgent deadlines) and a requirement to operate successfully in an environment of questionable data inputs and high penalties for failures or errors.

Electronic commerce involves both retail and wholesale commercial transactions—purchase of goods and services—across networks. These range, for example, from consumer on-line banking services to procurement of parts by manufacturers through electronic data interchange (EDI). Electronic commerce

Front Matter (R1-R14)

Overview and Summary (1-7)

Application Needs for Computing and Communications (8-54)

Technology: Research Problems Motivated by Application Needs (55-98)

Summary and Findings: Research for National-Scale Application (99-138)

Bibliography (139-142)

Appendixes (143-144)

A Workshop Series on High Performance Computing and Communications (145-155)

B Background--HPCCI and NII (156-157)

C Acronyms and Abbreviations (158-160)