European research networks

I regret that what I have to describe falls into the worthy but boring category. There are several reasons for this. The first is that networks bear a strong resemblance to gas pipes: necessary, invisible but of no real interest to anyone but gas engineers. It’s what the gas does that’s interesting rather than the pipes themselves. Next, we are, as I hope to show, one of the leaders in European networking, and since we are ahead of the game there is not a huge amount of relevance to say about Europe. I also want to describe the networks available to librarians rather than library networks, and so I shall concentrate on the UK scene and how it links into Europe, and refer to the real area of interest – the applications. Given the title of this paper, what I want to stress above all else is the applications and not the carriers.