The pace at which computing technology has advanced over the past forty years shows no sign of abating. Roughly speaking, each five-year period has yielded an order-of-magnitude improvement in price and performance of computing equipment. No fundamental hurdles are likely to prevent this pace from continuing for at least the next decade. It is only in the past five years, though, that computing has become ubiquitous in libraries, affecting all staff and patrons, directly or indirectly. During these same five years, communications rates on the Internet, the principal academic computing network, have grown from 56 kbps to 1.5 Mbps, and the NSFNet backbone is now running 45 Mbps. Over the next five years, communication rates on the backbone are expected to exceed 1 Gbps. Growth in both the population of network users and the volume of network traffic has continued to grow geometrically, at rates approaching 15 percent per month. This flood of capacity and use, likened by some to "drinking from a firehose," creates immense opportunities and challenges for libraries. Libraries must anticipate the future implications of this technology, participate in its development, and deploy it to ensure access to the world's information resources. The infrastructure for the information age is being put in place. Libraries face strategic decisions about their role in the development, deployment, and use of this infrastructure. The emerging infrastructure is much more than computers and communication lines. It is more than the ability to compute at a remote site, send electronic mail to a peer across the country, or move a file from one library to another. The next five years will witness substantial development of the information infrastructure of the network. In order to provide appropriate leadership, library professionals must have a fundamental understanding of and appreciation for computer networking, from local area networks to the National Research and Education Network (NREN). This presentation addresses these fundamentals, and how they relate to libraries today and in the near future. Edwin BROWNRIGG Electronic Library Visions and Realities The electronic library has been a vision desired by many--and rejected by some--since Vannevar Bush coined the term memex to describe an automated, intelligent, personal information system. Variations on this vision have included Ted Nelson's Xanadau, Alan Kay's Dynabook, and Lancaster's "paperless library," with the most recent incarnation being the "Knowledge Navigator" described by John Scully of Apple. But the reality of library service has been less visionary and the leap to the electronic library has eluded universities, publishers, and information technology files.