NREN

I can envision that little girl walking into the public library with the following request: "I'm doing a school report on the Challenger disaster. I need a video clip of the explosion, a sound bite of Richard Feynman explaining the O-ring problem, some neat graphics from NASA, oh, and maybe some virtual reality mock-ups of the shuttle interior. Can you put it all on this floppy disk for me, I know it's only 15 minutes before you close but, gee, I had band practice." This is why public libraries need NREN.

We would do well to remember the words of Ranganathan, whose basic tenets of good librarianship need just a little updating from 1931:

"[Information] is for use." "Every [bit of information], its user." "Every user, [his/her bit of information]." "Save the time of the [user]." "A [network] is a growing organism."

And so is the public library. A promising future awaits the public library that can be proactiv