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The games console, within the wider sector of electronic games and entertainment, is defined. A historical outline of the games console is given, indicating how the development of the console, and that of the PC, have intertwined over several decades. The emerging generation of games consoles possesses facilities that offer the possibility of access to networked resources, such as electronic library services, at a fraction of the cost of PC hardware. The Electronic Library and the increase in home‐based network access are discussed. Observations are then drawn from the use of a games console to interact with specific network‐based components of the “electronic library”. Alternative emerging modes of Internet and Network‐based access are touched upon. Aspects of game console usage within the library sector are considered and future developments of gaming and console technology, especially as applied to Network‐based service and resource access, are speculated upon.

Z39.50 is an information retrieval protocol. It has generated much interest but is so far little deployed in UK systems and services. This article gives a functional overview of the protocol itself and the standards background, describes some European initiatives which make use of it, and outlines various issues to do with its future use and acceptance. It is argued that Z39.50 is a crucial building block of future distributed information systems but that it needs to be considered alongside other protocols and services to provide useful applications.

The authors describe how an existing course in cataloguing for postgraduate students of librarianship at the University of Sheffield's Department of Information Studies was modified to include practical work on cataloguing electronic resources. The students were instructed to search the Internet for resources associated with some topic, and to design a cataloguing and classifying system for these resources. Each system was implemented as a collection of World‐Wide Web (WWW) pages, which have been installed on the Department's WWW site for global viewing.

“Quality‐controlled subject gateways” are Internet services which apply a rich set of quality measures to support systematic resource discovery. Considerable manual effort is used to secure a selection of resources which meet quality criteria and to display a rich description of these resources with standards‐based metadata. Regular checking and updating ensure good collection management. A main goal is to provide a high quality of subject access through indexing resources using controlled vocabularies and by offering a deep classification structure for advanced searching and browsing. This article provides an initial empirical overview of existing services of this kind, their approaches and technologies, based on proposed working definitions and typologies of subject gateways.

Clustering the output of a multi‐database online search enables a user to obtain an overview of the information that has been retrieved without the need to inspect any documents that contain only redundant information. In this paper we describe a classification scheme that characterises the degree of relationship between pairs of documents in database search‐outputs and then report the application of a range of clustering methods and similarity coefficients to 20 such outputs. These experiments demonstrate that clustering is capable of grouping documents that are identical to, or closely‐related to, other documents in the search‐output on the basis of their term similarities.

This paper provides an overview of the games console market, a rapidly growing sector of the entertainment industry. An overview of the emergence of games consoles, and advances in games console technology, is given, as well as examples of the increasing incorporation of aspects of computer gaming into Higher Education student courses. Current and future games consoles are described in some detail, and their networking capabilities considered. The paper then focuses on the requirements of users of networked‐based services. The first games console to come equipped with network access facilities is used in order to access a number of electronic library resources and services, and to consider the viability of such a device for this purpose. Comments on issues surrounding data exchange between electronic devices such as games consoles are given, and future developments in the games console sector, especially in relation to the remote access of electronic information resources and services, are speculated.