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Provision of public Internet access has been viewed by governments as a key step towards encouraging uptake among people who do not have access to information communication technologies, and as an important means of building an equitable information society. The Victorian Public Library network has led Australia in providing this access, at no small cost. However, little substantial data is available about the users of this public access, little is known of what they use the access for, nor how well it meets their needs. Through a wide‐scale survey, and through focus groups this study explores the demographic characteristics of public library public access Internet users, the extent to which public access Internet provision meets the needs of those users, and users' planned/future use of public access Internet. The role of public access and the policy implications of this data are discussed.

The Internet is well established as a major information source and it is becoming accepted that libraries will provide access to the Internet from workstations within their walls. This paper explores some of the issues which have emerged from the experience of one library—based service, VICNET, in the provision of Internet access and services. The Internet gives users the means not only to access increasingly rich information sources, but also has the ability to publish and communicate. The new communication media offer the opportunity to develop new and extremely rewarding roles for the Library.

This paper describes a new algorithm based on the Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) to solve the reliable communication network design problem (RCND). In this NP-hard problem, a subset of communication links must be chosen such that the network cost is minimized given a network reliability constraint. This problem is closely related to the network reliability computation problem.