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Home networks enable, potentially, an increased level of integration among appliances present in the house, enabling an ubiquitous control of devices and simplifying man/machine interactions. This paper aims to present the home network interoperability (HoNeY) platform.

Home networks and their challenges are analyzed, then the technology that constitutes the base for the present implementation is briefly revised. The HoNeY platform is presented, in terms of its architecture, implementation, and constraints.

The HoNeY platform is an multimedia home platform (MHP)‐based, low‐complex, cost‐effective architecture for automatic discovery, configuration, and dynamic access to distributed services in home environments.

This paper describes HoNeY, a mechanism of service discovery and code mobility designed for interoperability of devices connected to home networks, compatible with the MHP standard.

Digital libraries have been a feature of the information arena for some time. They have re‐defined the concept of “bibliographic instruction” in which the connotation “library” is implicit, but has become inadequate in a digital library context. This article relates the results of pilot studies of Internet use in academic libraries in the New York metropolitan area to the education of users in a digital library environment. It attempts to crystallize vital concepts and issues generated by interviewing users and information professionals, which could not be quantified in an earlier publication. The studies revealed an urgent need to develop user‐education programs that emphasize: the nature and various types of digital collections; interfaces; hardware and software requirements; telecommunications access modes; and making such programs part of continuing education.

The author describes how the University of Central Lancashire has chosen to make electronic document delivery available to remote users in accordance with the requirements of the European Commission research project BIBDEL. Details are given of the information technology resources deployed to offer this service and the difficulties experienced in doing so. The library management issues contingent on offering the service operationally are then explored; among which the current imprecision of copyright legislation is held to be the most important.

To give an overview of the current state and trends in authentication and authorisation in satisfying academic library users' mobility and instant access to digital information resources, and to propose that libraries strongly support efforts to establish a global authentication and authorisation infrastructure.

An overview of some national projects towards such an infrastructure for public institutions, including libraries, is provided.

There are many projects working towards such an infrastructure, but no single widely accepted authentication and authorisation infrastructure exists yet. A global authentication and authorisation infrastructure will enable users to use a single username and a password for all local and remote library services. It will consist of interconnected authentication/authorisation servers, where each institution will be responsible for a local user database.

The list of projects towards global authentication and authorisation infrastructure is not complete. Projects are not described in detail.

Libraries will have to join efforts towards a global authentication and authorisation infrastructure and to integrate this into their applications. That way, they will improve services for their users who are remote from their home institutions, enable users to access new services faster, lessen user frustration with forgotten passwords, reduce time spent on administrative tasks and also reduce the burden of password management and enable security improvements.

This paper fulfils an identified need to speed up the development of a global authentication and authorisation infrastructure.

The Open University Library's remit expanded in 1995 to include services to students. These services primarily involve providing access and guidance on the use of a range of electronic information resources. Electronic journals are important, as the Library does not currently offer a document delivery service to students. This article discusses a number of the issues relating to licensing and access arrangements that affect students' access to electronic journals.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the challenges and examine the impact of the transition from print to electronic resources at a medium‐sized academic library at a multi‐campus Caribbean university, The University of the West Indies (UWI), with particular reference to the St Augustine campus.

Through a review of the literature on the shift from print to electronic resources, the paper uses the experiences of The UWI St Augustine to provide a model that can be used by other libraries.

Libraries have successfully built a “hybrid” collection of print and electronic resources despite challenges with information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure, balancing costs, licencing model and strategies for selection, acquisition and management of electronic resources. There are some key steps which libraries can follow when transitioning from print to electronic resources.

The paper focuses on the experiences and lessons learnt in moving a collection from print to a hybrid of print and electronic resources. However, this by no means encapsulates all the issues associated with any such undertaking.

The paper provides some key steps that a library can take in transitioning its collection from print to a print‐electronic hybrid.

Although the literature speaks to different aspects of implementing electronic resources, this paper provides a roadmap for similar libraries with the lessons learnt and simple steps that a library should take when considering to move its collection from print to some level of electronic resources.

Topography is a problem in West Virginia. “If you took all the mountains of West Virginia and made them flat, West Virginia would be larger than Texas” is our boast and our network curse. Those mountains provide spectacular views, and stunning areas for our citizens who wish to maintain their independence. Those mountains and that remoteness also create difficulties in information equity, which we are just beginning to address.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.

As libraries increasingly automate and provide external access to their resources, a continual and growing need emerges for training of staff who implement, employ, and support these systems, and, in turn, train end‐users to exploit their new capabilities. The objectives and training techniques that have been adopted by individual institutions and technology providers vary, some being broadly structured toward educating staff members to function in the emerging electronic (virtual) library environment, some being more narrowly structured to facilitate adaptation and use of a specific new system that is being implemented. This symposium expresses the diverse training needs, experiences, and practices adopted by individual libraries, by consortia comprising a large number of libraries, by technology vendors striving to serve their library customers, and by academic computing services that share strategic responsibility for implementing online access to library resources.

This chapter will explore how assessment might look in next generation learning spaces where we have the potential to merge physical and virtual activities. Students now have ready access to a world of resources within their classroom and this fundamentally changes the nature of learning and assessment. The trend toward gamification of learning and assessment will be examined and the issue of assessment in new educational environments such as MOOCs will be explored. The impact of the semantic web (Web 3.0), where web objects and their context are all linked and objects have memory of how an individual student used them on previous occasions, will be discussed.

Next generation learning spaces encapsulate the affordances of both physical and virtual spaces and yet many assessment tasks are still designed as if students occupied only one of these spaces. Teachers will need to design more authentic, meaningful tasks that will engage students in using the full range of their capabilities and available resources, both physical and virtual. Students come together physically to engage in the social construction of their knowledge and can use the virtual spaces to broaden the social dimension of their learning environment.

Gamification of learning and assessment will require new approaches to defining tasks as teachers will need to decide how to incorporate diagnostic, formative, and summative assessment components within a more holistic educational environment. Game theory will be blended with learning theory in curriculum design and will result in the redesign of learning and assessment activities that are based on engagement (flow), user needs, and an evidence-centered design approach.